Energy groups push FERC to make changes recommended in Perry’s grid study
The free-market R Street Institute think tank also will be pressing the pro-market aspects of the Perry study with FERC.
R Street has been advocating that the Trump administration support FERC’s markets to meet its policy goals by supporting a wide range of power resources and competition. The study’s findings are encouraging because it emphasizes the use of markets to find the right solution to a problem, instead of being predisposed to a certain outcome, according to the group.
R Street met with Energy Department staff during the development of the report, said Devin Hartman, senior fellow with the group and former FERC staff member. He will be writing an open letter to FERC in September, “pushing them in a healthy direction on market design improvements, things that should pass muster with the rhetoric of this administration, but are also good economic policy principles.”
Hartman said the issue of price formation has had bipartisan support in the past and was actually begun under the Obama administration. “Those are kind of no-brainers [for recommendations], so it was kind of good to see them revisit that,” he said.
“But overall, the study sets a healthy tone that they are going to do things that are empirically driven, and they want to have a productive dialogue on how to take a market-based approach going froward,” Hartman said.
R Street also supports the infrastructure recommendations in the study, which support improvements to the permitting and siting of hydropower projects, which the commission also has jurisdiction over.
Hartman just released a paper on hydropower that underscores the slowness in licensing the facilities. He said many people blame FERC for that, but it is actually the maze of other agencies that must sign off on a project that can delay development for years.
