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Page 2: U.S. energy infrastructure under pressure >> By Peter Gardett
Managing Editor, AOL Energy
There has been more transmission built "in the last ten years than in the previous ten," former Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Marc Spitzer told AOL Energy in a recent discussion about his priorities as he reenters the private sector. Spitzer is currently a partner in the Electric Power Group at law firm Steptoe & Johnson, following his original indication he would leave FERC last summer and a final voluntary departure from the Commission in mid-December. The difficulty of being a regulator in the energy business lies in creating a "healthy tension" between regulators and the regulated community as a way of achieving a proper balance, Spitzer said. FERC is widely regarded as a bipartisan, almost academic, institution in a polarized Washington, DC. FERC has come under fire from some quarters during the tenure of Chairman Jon Wellinghoff for market design and case rulings critics have said favor renewable energy and incumbent generators. For more on the controversy surrounding some aspects of Wellinghoff's chairmanship, read more here on AOL Energy. "To benefit ratepayers all fuel options should be considered and allowed to compete," Spitzer said. Quoting Thomas Jefferson on states as the laboratories of democracy, he said that choices by states on renewable generation sources need to be respected. FERC's success in boosting the prospects of natural gas and transmission projects through its individual decisions and its more over-arching rulemakings, the most recently prominent of which is FERC Order 1000, is representative of "a pretty studioU.S. effort by both industry and regulators to increase [investment in] electric transmission and natural gas infrastructure," Spitzer said. Read a guide to FERC Order 1000 here.
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