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Federal regulators must tackle interregional transmission planning in order to maximize the capacity of wind and solar power on the U.S. power grid, a bipartisan group of former Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioners and Chairs agreed on Wednesday.
Their consensus follows the release of a comprehensive report released from the nonprofit transmission advocacy group Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG) that calls for robust interregional planning in order to widen access to cheap renewable energy resources, as well as improve the overall resilience and reliability of the grid. The report calls for more than just a system upgrade it asks for a comprehensive overhaul of the current utility-by-utility piecemeal transmission buildout.
Dive Brief:
Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioners shot down a number of agenda items proposed by Chair James Danly on Tuesday in what stakeholders called an abnormal meeting.
The meeting marked Danly s last as head of FERC, and led to the rejection of several gas infrastructure projects, the dismissal of a proposal that would have expanded the Minimum Offer Price Rule (MOPR) in the New York Independent System Operator s (NYISO) territory, and the partial rejection of a request for rehearing clarification on the MOPR expansion in the PJM Interconnection. This meeting is not normal, said Gillian Giannetti, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council s Sustainable FERC Project, in a tweet. You don t put orders on the Sunshine notice that will fail.