To unlock affordable grid capacity, policymakers should require utilities to consider the best-available line technologies by default, while utilities themselves modernize planning to reinforce their affordability commitment to customers.
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China could control the future of energy if America doesn’t act fast
Rather than causing disparate groups to come together to recognize the importance of all forms of energy, oil prices have resulted in some pushing harder for oil and gas and others pressing harder for solar, wind and batteries. This is a false dichotomy. Both are needed.
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A Measured Response on Critical Minerals: Reflections from a Recent Roundtable
Before instituting sweeping policies that risk creating costs and distortions worse than the supply disruptions and Chinese dependence they aim to solve, Washington needs to weigh the benefits of intervention against its costs.
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Why a Tech-Neutral Energy Policy Is Important
Governments shouldn’t determine which forms of energy are “good” or “bad,” using subsidies and mandates to boost the good while imposing restrictions to hobble the bad. Instead, decisions about the fuel mix should be left to the market as much as possible.
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Federal Critical Minerals Investments Need a Cost-Benefit Test
The risks posed by this concentration are worth taking seriously. The problem is that these tools may force taxpayers to take on unnecessary risk—leaving them stuck with the bill if the companies fail—without addressing the underlying problem.
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We Know How to Reduce Wildfire Risk. Policy Is Standing in the Way
The need to reduce fire risk is apparent, and we know how to do so through active forest management. Yet policy continues to slow those efforts down and that urgently needs to change.
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Federal Grid Reforms Pick the Right Route and the Wrong Builder
The Department of Energy’s recent National Transmission Needs Study identifies several of these cases, where regions’ electricity costs would decline substantially if they were connected by a high-capacity transmission line. Providing these benefits to consumers, however, requires confronting not just the incentives that discourage utilities from building interregional lines, but the state laws that let incumbent monopolies control who builds them.
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Common Sense Returns to the Endangered Species Act
By rescinding the expansive regulatory definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act and returning to Justice Scalia’s narrower textual reading that limits “take” to direct actions against individual animals, federal agencies have struck a blow for property rights, reduced unnecessary land-use controls, and restored freer market incentives.
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Pennsylvania Wants Data Centers to Pay Their Own Way. There’s a Better Way to Do It.
Lawmakers in both parties are scrambling to address the issues revealed by data centers. President Donald Trump, his administration officials, and several governors (including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro) signed on to a statement of principles that encourage data centers to bring their own power or pay for the power they need.
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Advisory Council on Historic Preservation Releases Section 106 Modernization
Congress is running short on time to pass a comprehensive permitting reform package before the lame duck this fall. On the table awaiting votes are bills reforming the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, and Clean Air Act. The National Historic Preservation Act, which has recently gained traction as a permitting barrier to projects, has received comparatively little attention in Congress.