POLITICO reports on the West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative (WWGPI)'s new proposal to regionalize the Western power grid, which is expected to gain broad bipartisan support despite potential challenges from a Trump-appointed FERC leadership. The article quotes United's Brian Turner, a member of the WWGPI Launch Committee, discussing how this move will strengthen regional cooperation.
Veterans of California’s failed attempts to unify the Western power grid have gone multiple rounds shadowboxing with President-elect Donald Trump over fears he’d try to force more fossil fuels on the climate-minded state.
They should hang up their gloves, say members of the West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative, the group working on the state’s latest grid unification effort. The group, which just this week got a $1 million grant from the Biden administration to help with planning, is scheduled to vote Friday on the latest regionalization proposal.
The expected vote of support will start the proposal on its way to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, where it will likely face a Trump-appointed chair who will have a hand in deciding its fate.
The Pathways people aren’t worried about it largely because the current regional push has already achieved remarkable buy-in from both Republican and Democratic states stretching from Idaho to Nevada to New Mexico. They’ve coalesced around what you could call a “Go it alone, together” approach.
“Now more than ever, spreading our support among those states and entities actually strengthens our hand,” said Brian Turner, an Advanced Energy United director who is a member of the Pathways launch committee.
Past proposals called for giving California’s grid operator expanded power over Western grid operations, which was expected to save money and improve reliability for everyone by cutting out the inefficiencies of smaller grids operating on their own.
But other states didn’t like it, fearing the large, progressive state of California would prioritize its own needs over its neighbors. The proposed solution to that — sharing control of the grid with other Western players — wasn’t popular at home. Labor, environmentalists and consumer groups worried it could export jobs and jeopardize the state’s climate goals, particularly under the authority of a Trump administration that could seek to boost fossil fuels.
The Pathways proposal circumvents some of that concern by not even dealing with the question of operating the Western grid. Instead, it calls for breaking off two California-run energy markets and transferring them to an independent organization overseen by a board from around the West. The approach is meant to harness what’s worked — California’s real-time energy market is credited with saving billions of dollars already — and to build trust before moving, maybe, to a grid with a central operator.
The Pathways group has taken pains to ensure other states won’t have to play by California’s rules, which call for getting to 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. By the same token, other states’ energy priorities won’t be imposed on California.
If the Pathways committee approves the proposal tomorrow, it’s expected to go to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for approval in 18 to 24 months. By that point, Trump likely will have appointed a new commission chair.
Based on how FERC has operated, it’s a bit far-fetched to expect the commission to do something like that or to block the Pathways proposal, said Michael Giberson, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based, conservative-leaning R Street Institute.
FERC tends to let states figure out among themselves how they want to run energy markets and approves proposals so long as they comply with the law, he said. And in the West, energy regulators in both political parties seem happy with how things are going.
“They’ve seen benefits for their customers in their states,” he said. “There’s not a groundswell of Republican state commissioners in the West that are saying, ‘Let’s stop what’s going on.’”
Kathleen Staks, who is Pathways’ co-chair and the executive director of Western Freedom, a trade group representing large commercial and industrial electricity customers, said she is confident in the broad support for the effort. But she’s not eager to make predictions about the next four years.
“I think the risk comes down to uncertainty around what Trump is ultimately going to do to the institution that is FERC,” she said.
Read the full article here.