[Senate Hearing 117-448]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                                                        S. Hrg. 117-448

                   A REVIEW OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF
                   LAWS UNDER THE JURISDICTION OF THE
                  FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                              COMMITTEE ON
                      ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES
                          UNITED STATES SENATE

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION
                               __________

                           SEPTEMBER 28, 2021
                               __________


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                       Printed for the use of the
               Committee on Energy and Natural Resources

        Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov
        
        
                               __________

                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
                    
45-807                   WASHINGTON : 2023         
        
        
        
               COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES

                JOE MANCHIN III, West Virginia, Chairman
RON WYDEN, Oregon                    JOHN BARRASSO, Wyoming
MARIA CANTWELL, Washington           JAMES E. RISCH, Idaho
BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont             MIKE LEE, Utah
MARTIN HEINRICH, New Mexico          STEVE DAINES, Montana
MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii              LISA MURKOWSKI, Alaska
ANGUS S. KING, JR., Maine            JOHN HOEVEN, North Dakota
CATHERINE CORTEZ MASTO, Nevada       JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma
MARK KELLY, Arizona                  BILL CASSIDY, Louisiana
JOHN W. HICKENLOOPER, Colorado       CINDY HYDE-SMITH, Mississippi
                                     ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas

                      Renae Black, Staff Director
                      Sam E. Fowler, Chief Counsel
                 Brie Van Cleve, Senior Energy Advisor
             Richard M. Russell, Republican Staff Director
              Matthew H. Leggett, Republican Chief Counsel
      Justin Memmott, Republican Deputy Staff Director for Energy
                            C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              

                           OPENING STATEMENTS

                                                                   Page
Manchin III, Hon. Joe, Chairman and a U.S. Senator from West 
  Virginia.......................................................     1
Barrasso, Hon. John, Ranking Member and a U.S. Senator from 
  Wyoming........................................................     2

                               WITNESSES

Glick, Hon. Richard, Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory 
  Commission.....................................................     8
Christie, Hon. Mark C., Commissioner, Federal Energy Regulatory 
  Commission.....................................................    18
Clements, Hon. Allison, Commissioner, Federal Energy Regulatory 
  Commission.....................................................    20
Danly, Hon. James, Commissioner, Federal Energy Regulatory 
  Commission.....................................................    27

          ALPHABETICAL LISTING AND APPENDIX MATERIAL SUBMITTED

Barrasso, Hon. John:
    Opening Statement............................................     2
    Wall Street Journal article entitled ``Energy Prices in 
      Europe Hit Records After Wind Stops Blowing'' by Joe 
      Wallace, dated 9/13/2021...................................     4
    Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled ``Climate Policy 
      Meets Cold Reality in Europe'' by Allysia Finley, dated 9/
      27/2021....................................................    37
Christie, Hon. Mark C.:
    Opening Statement............................................    18
    Written Testimony............................................    19
    Responses to Questions for the Record........................    98
Clements, Hon. Allison:
    Opening Statement............................................    20
    Written Testimony............................................    22
    Responses to Questions for the Record........................   109
Danly, Hon. James:
    Opening Statement............................................    27
    Written Testimony............................................    29
    Responses to Questions for the Record........................   122
Glick, Hon. Richard:
    Opening Statement............................................     8
    Written Testimony............................................    11
    Responses to Questions for the Record........................    75
Hickenlooper, Hon. John W.:
    National Renewable Energy Laboratory map showing clean energy 
      sources nationwide.........................................    52
Manchin III, Hon. Joe:
    Opening Statement............................................     1
Niskanen Center:
    Statement for the Record.....................................   148

 
 A REVIEW OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF LAWS UNDER THE JURISDICTION OF THE 
                  FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION

                              ----------                              


                      TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2021

                                       U.S. Senate,
                 Committee on Energy and Natural Resources,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:08 a.m. in 
Room SD-366, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Joe Manchin 
III, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.

          OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOE MANCHIN III, 
                U.S. SENATOR FROM WEST VIRGINIA

    The Chairman. The Committee will come to order. I am 
pleased to be joined by all four of our sitting Federal Energy 
Regulatory Commissioners this morning. I want to thank you all 
for being here to discuss the work of the Commission. As you 
all have heard me say before, the best FERC is a fully seated 
FERC, and I am looking forward to quickly holding a hearing on 
Willie Phillips, President Biden's nominee to fill the vacant 
seat on the Commission, once we receive all the necessary 
paperwork. Now, although we had some of you before the Energy 
Committee fairly recently as nominees, it has been over three 
years since we have had the full Commission appear together 
before our Committee.
    This morning, I look forward to hearing how the Commission 
is working through our nation's important energy challenges and 
ensuring that those issues are all balanced against 
affordability and reliability of electric services for all 
Americans and their businesses. I was pleased to see that the 
FERC and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, 
or NERC, released their preliminary report last week, focused 
on the electric grid catastrophe suffered by millions of 
customers in Texas and other states last winter. I know there 
will be a great deal of interest in what corrections are needed 
to avoid these types of massive outages in the future. The 
energy mix has continued to undergo a transition due to market 
forces and weather patterns that are changing. We all had 
better focus on solving the challenges that come with this 
ongoing transition. A common theme in recent events from the 
extreme heat in California in August 2020 or the extreme cold 
around the country last winter is a failure to plan for 
adequate energy resources in the context of these changing 
weather patterns and generation portfolios. Having reliable 
power is not a ``nice-to-have'' for a superpower economy. We 
have to get this right. But we have an obligation to balance 
the cost of reliability and resilience with affordability 
because affordability is also not optional.
    There is wide agreement that we need to address climate 
change, but less agreement on how, how fast, and at what cost. 
In my view, the only way to do it without sacrificing 
reliability and affordability is with policies that spur 
innovation, not elimination. It makes no sense to take tools 
out of the toolbox because we know that none of these energy 
resources are 100 percent immune to weather disruptions, 
whether that be freezing wind turbines, disruption to our 
natural gas production and delivery systems, or frozen coal 
stockpiles, all of which we saw happen last winter. We have to 
maintain a diverse and reliable energy mix with the 
technologies necessary to reduce our emissions, because when 
the sun sets in the middle of a regional heatwave, people 
expect grid operators and utilities to have firm generation 
ready to go, be that energy storage or natural gas. As we all 
know, FERC has a very important role in regulating natural gas 
markets and the infrastructure that is needed to move natural 
gas safely and efficiently.
    We have natural gas to thank for the lion's share of the 
decarbonization we have seen in the power sector over the last 
20 years, and natural gas has helped manage prices and 
reliability. We have vast reserves of this commodity right in 
our backyard that can continue to support our energy 
independence. In 2019, the Appalachian Basin alone produced an 
estimated 11.5 trillion--that's with a ``T''-- cubic feet of 
natural gas, helping America become a net energy exporter for 
the first time in 67 years. However, moving this gas to market 
safely and efficiently is a necessity, and in order to do that 
we need to smartly expand the country's natural gas 
infrastructure system. According to regulators, pipelines have 
a 99.99 percent safety record, making them the safest mode of 
energy transportation. I believe that natural gas has an 
important role in the energy transition, and we need to ensure 
an efficient, predictable permitting process for pipelines. 
Congress expects FERC to update and revise its policies and 
practices in response to new facts and new technologies and 
certainly court decisions, of course, but that is while 
following current law and current policies in processing 
applications expeditiously.
    I look forward to discussing how the Commission is 
balancing the need for updates with an obligation to the 
industry to provide fair and timely review of permit 
applications.
    With that, I am going to turn to Senator Barrasso for his 
opening remarks.

           OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN BARRASSO, 
                   U.S. SENATOR FROM WYOMING

    Senator Barrasso. Well, thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. 
Thank you for holding today's hearing. It couldn't be coming at 
a more critical time. I am especially appreciative of your 
opening comments both focusing on affordability and reliability 
of our energy because, as we speak, this Administration and 
House Democrats are working frantically to impose a witch's 
brew of reckless energy policies across the entire nation. The 
House Democrats' plans will effectively end any new oil, 
natural gas, coal, and hardrock mineral production on federal 
lands and waters. If enacted, their bill surrenders America's 
energy independence and makes us dependent on OPEC, Russia, and 
China. It also would devastate communities across the West and 
the Gulf Coast. House Democrats also plan to impose a natural 
gas tax on American families and businesses. At a time when 
inflation is at its highest level since 2008, these policies 
make it more expensive for American families to heat and power 
their homes.
    Mr. Chairman, the magazine, The Economist, last week 
pointed out that higher energy costs anger voters and hurt the 
poor. But price increases--they increase inflation, they lower 
standards of living, and yet the House Democrats' plan would 
establish a so-called ``Clean Electricity Performance 
Program,'' which will add to the costs of energy. It is a 
scheme. It would use an estimated $150 billion of taxpayer 
dollars to pay off the largest utilities in the country to 
deploy the Democrats' favorite energy sources. At the same 
time, it will allow those utilities to charge their customers 
for new transmission lines to service these facilities. And to 
add insult to injury, Democrats do not plan to debate and 
consider the legislation through regular order. They will not 
even allow the public to provide testimony on their bill. 
Instead, they plan to ram it through the legislative process on 
a completely partisan basis.
    Not one Republican is going to support that bill. We will 
not support it because we have witnessed the disastrous results 
of these polices elsewhere. Let's look at California. 
California prematurely shut down nuclear, natural gas, and 
coal-fired power plants. They have richly subsidized solar and 
wind energy. Now the people of California pay some of the 
highest electricity prices in the country. In return, millions 
of California residents have been subject to rolling blackouts 
over the last two years. They are having a hard time trying to 
keep the lights on in California. It is so bad that the 
Secretary of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory 
Commission have had to give California waivers. Waivers to do 
what? Well, to allow them to use natural gas plants to run 
overtime.
    We should also look at what is happening in Europe. Like 
California, European countries prematurely shut down their 
nuclear power, their natural gas, their coal-fired power 
plants. And what did they do? They richly subsidized wind and 
solar energy. Now Europe's electric grids are failing to 
deliver, and electricity prices in Europe are hitting all-time 
record highs. A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal, Mr. 
Chairman, here it is, ``European Energy Prices Surge.'' What's 
the sub-headline? ``Lack of North Sea wind curbs an electrical 
source just as stocks of natural gas are low.'' The article 
notes that this month, electricity prices in the United 
Kingdom, because of policy decisions made there, are seven 
times what they were just one year ago--seven times higher than 
what they were one year ago.
    [The article referred to follows:]

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    Senator Barrasso. Now Europe does not have sufficient 
supplies of natural gas. This puts them completely at the mercy 
of foreign actors, including Russia. Make no mistake, this is 
America's future if President Biden and House Democrats get 
their way.
    For these reasons, I am glad we have members of the FERC 
before us today. Among FERC's authorities, as the principal 
regulator of natural gas and electricity, the Commission has 
the responsibility to ensure Americans have affordable and 
reliable natural gas and electric service--Mr. Chairman, the 
two words that you used to start your opening statement today. 
FERC is an independent agency, not merely an arm of the White 
House. In other words, FERC Commissioners have the opportunity 
as well as the obligation to speak the truth about the 
potential impacts of these polices on all Americans. They can 
explain the consequences of the reckless policies to a 
President who seems intent on putting rhetoric ahead of reality 
and politics ahead of the people of this country.
    Welcome to you all, and I look forward to hearing your 
testimony. A number of us have some probing questions.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Barrasso.
    I would like to welcome all four of our witnesses to the 
Committee and thank you for being here today. It is nice to see 
all of you in person, in one place, in one setting.
    We have Chairman Rich Glick with us. We have Commissioner 
Mark Christie. We have Commissioner Allison Clements. And we 
have Commissioner James Danly. Chairman Glick, we are going to 
begin with your opening remarks, if you will, sir.

           OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD GLICK, 
         CHAIRMAN, FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION

    Mr. Glick. Thank you very much, Chairman Manchin, Ranking 
Member Barrasso, and members of the Committee. Thank you for 
inviting my colleagues and me to appear before you today to 
discuss the important work we are doing at the Federal Energy 
Regulatory Commission. I am honored to appear before you for 
the first time since being designated by President Biden as 
Chair of the Commission in January. I am also very glad to be 
back in this room where I spent so many hours as a staff person 
on a couple of different occasions.
    The nation's energy landscape is in the midst of a dramatic 
transformation driven by rapid changes in economics, 
technological innovation, changing consumer preferences, and 
the exigency of climate change. Residential, commercial, and 
industrial customers are increasingly demanding that their 
energy come from zero-
emissions resources. Dozens of the biggest utilities in the 
country have established their own decarbonization goals, and a 
growing number of state and federal policies are aimed at 
dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The 
Commission's job is not to pick winners and losers, but we do 
have a role in eliminating barriers to technology's 
participation in wholesale markets. For instance, over the last 
several years, FERC issued landmark orders facilitating energy 
storage and aggregated distributed energy resources' 
participation in organized wholesale electricity markets.
    Today, I will focus my remarks on five priority areas of 
our work: (1) building the transmission grid of the future, (2) 
modernizing electricity market design, (3) updating FERC's 
natural gas certificate policy statement, (4) safeguarding the 
reliability of the electric grid, and (5) facilitating a more 
inclusive decisionmaking process.
    The rapid shift in the resource mix and the growing threat 
to grid resilience due to the changing climate requires 
significant investments in new and existing transmission. In 
July, the Commission unanimously approved an Advance Notice of 
Proposed Rulemaking (ANOPR) inviting the public to comment on 
potential reforms to improve current transmission planning and 
cost allocation and generator interconnection processes. The 
aim of this initiative is to meet the transmission needs of the 
future at the lowest cost to consumers. Through the ANOPR, FERC 
is taking a critical step toward our first major effort of 
transmission reform in a decade, and I hope to move forward as 
expeditiously as possible with this priority work.
    While organized wholesale electric markets continue to 
provide for lower prices, greater efficiencies, and increased 
innovation, these markets are now some 20 years old and in 
certain regards, may fail to reflect the modern electric 
sector. One key focus is to address the growing tension between 
state public policies and administrative pricing rules. As 
states were adopting clean energy policies that shifted the 
resource mix toward renewable and zero-emissions generation, 
the Commission expanded its minimum offer price rules (MOPRs) 
in the eastern RTO capacity markets in a manner that put state-
supported generation resources at a competitive disadvantage.
    In response to strong concerns from the states, clean 
energy industry, and consumer groups, the regional grid 
operators have initiated stakeholder discussions to reform 
their capacity market rules to better accommodate state 
policies. In addition, the Commission generally relies on 
competition to establish just and reasonable rates in wholesale 
markets, but this only works if there is true competition. The 
Commission's vigilant use of its authority to prevent 
manipulation of electric and natural gas markets is an 
essential tool to ensure rates are just and reasonable.
    Under the Natural Gas Act (NGA), FERC essentially must 
determine whether a proposed interstate natural gas pipeline is 
both needed and in the public interest before issuing the 
Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity. In 2018, then 
Chairman McIntyre initiated a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) seeking 
input into the potential reforms to modernize the Commission's 
1999 certificate policy statement. While the Commissioner 
received numerous comments at the time, no action was taken. 
Earlier this year, we issued another Notice of Inquiry seeking 
additional input, including: (1) options for determining 
whether a proposed pipeline project is needed, (2) approaches 
for evaluating a proposed project's impact on climate change, 
and (3) what considerations are required when a proposed 
project would be sited in an environmental justice community.
    The need to see this proceeding to a conclusion is even 
more urgent in the aftermath of several appellate court 
decisions highly critical of aspects of the Commission's 
approach to pipeline certification. As we have witnessed in 
Texas this past winter, the prolonged loss of electric service 
is more than just an inconvenience. It can and did produce 
tragic results. FERC and the North American Electric 
Reliability Corporation are conducting a joint inquiry into the 
operations of the bulk electric system during Winter Storm Uri, 
and recently released an interim report suggesting that a lack 
of weatherized generation and problems associated with natural 
gas production and processing were the main causes of the Texas 
blackouts. I am determined that the recommendations arising 
from this joint inquiry be implemented to avoid a reoccurrence 
of the events. Whether it is prolonged record cold, heatwaves, 
drought and wildfires in the West, or increasing ferociousness 
of hurricanes in the Gulf, climate change poses a distinct 
threat to grid reliability. The Commission recently initiated a 
docket to examine the impact of extreme weather on grid 
reliability. It will continue to focus on actions that 
utilities and others can take to address the growing threat of 
extreme weather.
    We need to be equally vigilant when it comes to potential 
cyberattacks against the grid. At FERC, we use a two-pronged 
approach to safeguard grid security, employing mandatory 
standards to set requirements for foundational practices like 
working collaboratively with industry, states, and other 
federal agencies to identify and promote best practices. Given 
the high stakes, we devote constant attention to, and continue 
to explore improvements in our cybersecurity. And last, FERC's 
regulatory actions have a significant impact on the lives of 
millions of people. As a result, it is important that our 
decisionmaking processes include robust input from diverse 
perspectives. That is why I am pleased that the new Office of 
Public Participation is up and running. I want to commend my 
colleague, Commissioner Clements, for her leadership and her 
hard work in helping to establish the office.
    Toward the goal of inclusivity, I want to highlight FERC's 
efforts to better incorporate environmental justice and equity 
concerns into our decisionmaking. It is unlikely that FERC is 
hearing from members of historically marginalized communities 
with the same force and frequency as other stakeholders and 
thus, it is essential that environmental justice and equity get 
the attention in our decisionmaking processes that they 
deserve.
    Thank you again for the opportunity to share some of the 
Commission's priorities. I look forward to responding to your 
questions.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Glick follows:]

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    The Chairman. Thank you, Chairman Glick.
    And now, we will have Commissioner Mark Christie.

   OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. MARK C. CHRISTIE, COMMISSIONER, 
              FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION

    Mr. Christie. Chairman Manchin, Ranking Member Barrasso, 
members of the Committee, it is truly an honor to be here for 
the first time as a member of the Commission. It was just over 
one year ago that I appeared before you as a nominee and I want 
to thank you for all the courtesies that this Committee gave me 
a year ago.
    I said then that my two highest priorities--and I think 
FERC's highest priorities--are to maintain the reliability of 
the electric grid and also make sure that costs remain 
affordable for consumers. I want to mention, Mr. Chairman, you 
made those same comments in your opening statement. So I want 
to mention something that I think is relevant to that. As you 
know, you asked me about this last year, and as you know, I 
spent 17 years as a state regulator in Virginia. And as a state 
regulator in Virginia, I learned an awful lot about your state, 
Mr. Chairman, West Virginia, because we share jurisdiction with 
Appalachian Power Company, which is the largest utility in West 
Virginia, certainly in the southern half of the state. West 
Virginia has a generating fleet that is 90 percent coal. If 
West Virginia is forced during the transition that we're going 
through to prematurely retire that entire fleet, number one, 
you have a reliability problem in West Virginia because 90 
percent of your generating fleet is coal. But second, you have 
a cost problem, because that fleet has to be replaced with 
replacement power and West Virginia consumers have to pay for 
that. And third, most of those generating units in West 
Virginia I am familiar with are in rate base. And what that 
means is, if you shut them down, West Virginians are going to 
be paying for them for years to come even though they are not 
operating.
    So as you mentioned, Mr. Chairman, we're going through a 
transition. We're going through a transition to a lower carbon 
future, and everybody wants to get there. But as we go through 
this transition, it is absolutely essential that reliability 
not be compromised and that consumers not be exploited. And 
with that, thank you again. I appreciate being here, Mr. 
Chairman.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Christie follows:]

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    The Chairman. Thank you, Commissioner Christie.
    And now we are going to hear from Commissioner Allison 
Clements.

   OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ALLISON CLEMENTS, COMMISSIONER, 
              FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION

    Ms. Clements. Thank you, Chairman Manchin, Ranking Member 
Barrasso, and members of the Committee. It is quite an honor to 
have an opportunity to testify before you today.
    For several decades, the Commission has met its 
responsibilities under the Federal Power Act (FPA) and the 
Natural Gas Act (NGA) by adapting to reflect changing 
circumstances. These circumstances include technological 
advancements, shifting economic and market dynamics, the 
emerging cyberthreat, and evolving federal, state, and local 
energy policies. While the Commission's adaptation to change is 
familiar, the current magnitude of challenges driving the need 
for this change is unprecedented. My testimony today describes 
three priorities the Commission should pursue to protect 
customers while facilitating a reliable and resilient energy 
system.
    First, we must safeguard the energy system against extreme 
weather. Members of this Committee in particular understand the 
suffering and the issues posed by excessive heat, drought, and 
wildfires in the West, increasing frequency and severity of 
hurricanes in the Gulf Coast and up the Eastern Seaboard, and 
unusual heat domes and extreme cold around the country. Current 
policies are not adequate to meet these new realities. Of 
course, the issues cannot be boiled down to just a reliability 
standards problem, or just a transmission system planning 
problem, or just a market design problem. As FERC and NERC 
staff describe in the preliminary findings from the February 
Storm Uri event, we must address extreme weather holistically 
to ensure reliability and resilience. The Commission has 
appropriately opened a docket examining challenges posed by 
extreme weather, and I will urge Commission action based on 
what we learn in this record.
    My second priority is ensuring that FERC's regulations 
better facilitate construction of cost-effective, high-voltage 
transmission infrastructure. Action here is a priority for two 
reasons. First, as was affirmed in the initial analysis of 
Storm Uri, as well as in earlier polar vortex events in 2014 
and 2019, linking grid regions together via high-voltage 
transmission continues to pay reliability and resilience 
dividends during extreme weather events. Second, the U.S. 
transmission system is not equipped to integrate resources that 
otherwise outcompete existing ones and meet consumer demands 
for clean energy. Declining costs of wind, solar, and hybrid 
generation, which make up the majority of the new supply 
seeking to connect to the grid, are not translating into the 
customer benefits they hold the potential to provide. The 
reason: outdated and often unworkable transmission planning, 
cost allocation, and interconnection policy. Current planning 
happens, generally, in a piecemeal fashion based on analysis 
that is not sufficiently forward-looking to protect customers. 
The result has been inadequate system build-out, leading to 
overloaded interconnection cues and project development delays 
and, of course, the costs that come along with them. Failure to 
act on this priority will further endanger both customers and 
broader system reliability. The Commission's recently issued 
Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is a critical step to 
examine how holistic, forward-looking planning based on a more 
accurate assessment of future conditions can avoid such 
outcomes. It will provide an important record from which to 
take action.
    My third and final priority is to modernize the 
Commission's interstate gas pipeline certification approach to 
protect the public interest and increase regulatory certainty. 
I am eager to achieve a legally durable framework for 
considering certificate applications under the Natural Gas Act, 
one that achieves balance by providing consistency and 
regulatory certainty to both project sponsors and the public 
that we are pledged to serve. The Commission's outstanding 
Notice of Inquiry on updating our 1999 policy statement 
provides a record to consider the perspectives of stakeholders 
across the energy sector toward this goal. While we are 
considering this record, however, we cannot ignore our 
responsibility to implement our existing policy statement 
consistent with binding appellate court instructions going back 
to 2017. The D.C. Circuit's recent vacatur of the Commission's 
decision granting Spire Pipeline's certificate demonstrates the 
harm that may befall project sponsors and consumers when the 
Commission's decisional process falls short. As part of this 
effort, I have prioritized improved public participation in 
Commission proceedings. The Chairman spoke about the Office of 
Participation, a Congressionally directed office which is 
intended to do just that.
    It has been the greatest honor to begin service to the 
American people, and thank you again for the opportunity to be 
here today.
    [The prepared statement of Ms. Clements follows:]

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    The Chairman. Thank you, Commissioner.
    And now, we will have Commissioner James Danly.

 OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JAMES DANLY, COMMISSIONER, FEDERAL 
                  ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION

    Mr. Danly. Chairman Manchin, Ranking Member Barrasso, 
members of the Committee, thank you for having us here. I am 
going to begin by talking about a few items within the 
Commission's jurisdiction that I am particularly concerned 
about.
    The first is our authority to certificate pipeline 
infrastructure under Section 7 of the Natural Gas Act. The 
purpose of the Natural Gas Act is to encourage the development 
of plentiful supplies of natural gas at affordable prices. A 
handful of actions that the Commission has taken recently have 
created such a climate of uncertainty that it has stultified 
the ability of pipelines to rationally deploy capital or secure 
financing. In our utility system in America we rely upon 
private enterprise to deliver essential services and the 
business consequences to these jurisdictional entities are 
profound.
    We have had a couple of cases that have thrown real doubt 
into the certificate process. One of them apparently seemed to 
reopen to litigation the terms of a closed certificate. You 
have to understand the consequences that can have. It costs 
hundreds of millions of dollars to operate and construct a 
pipeline and people will not finance projects of that size if 
they think that the certificate terms are up for later 
relitigation. Another problem has been the hints that have been 
dropped in our generic proceedings in another case that we 
could condition the certificates that eventually do issue on 
some form of mitigation. And it has yet to be seen what form or 
shape that would take or what the costs would be and how they 
would be imposed. And last, the pipeline industry has witnessed 
seemingly inexplicable delays in the processing of the NEPA 
documents, the National Environmental Policy Act documents 
we're required to make, in which the Commission staff has 
determined that EAs--that is the shorter environmental 
assessments--were not sufficient, but full EISs (environmental 
impact statements) were required. And what I think causes the 
pipeline companies confusion is that, at least in two of the 
cases, the EISs--the full reviews--have come out and they've 
reached the exact same conclusion that the shorter 
environmental assessments did.
    All told, these different actions of the Commission have 
caused such uncertainty that just last week, a very small 
pipeline project--it was upgrades to compressor stations in 
Pennsylvania and Virginia--the application was withdrawn 
because FERC did not take an action on beginning the 
environmental review. So I just want to highlight to the 
Committee that it is critical that we have stable processes in 
place, otherwise financing will not be available and this 
infrastructure that's needed--remember, as we learned, sadly in 
Texas, if the light--if the gas system goes down so does the 
electric system. People rely upon this infrastructure and it 
needs to be developed in an orderly manner and there has to be 
stability for that.
    I'll briefly touch on two other points. I am concerned 
about our authority under the Federal Power Act to set rates 
for electric transmission. There is, at this point, a great 
deal of enthusiasm for a rapid build-out of transmission in 
America and doubtless there are places in which further 
transmission development is necessary for reliability to reduce 
congestion. Those are legitimate and appropriate reasons to be 
building transmission and those costs rightly go to the 
consumers who get the benefit of that transmission build-out. 
But in the enthusiasm the people have to bring intermittent-
resource-generated power from remote locations where it is 
produced to the load centers of the urban areas where it is 
consumed, I am greatly concerned that the value propositions 
set forth of getting inexpensive renewable energy may be a 
loser in the end because if the cost of the power is cheap but 
the cost of the transmission is high, you will see in the end, 
possibly, ``all-in'' bills to the ratepayer and it is the 
ratepayer that ultimately bears all of the cost of the 
transmission system. The all-in bill to the ratepayer may 
actually be higher than it would have been had locally produced 
electricity been employed. We are constrained by unambiguous 
court precedent to have a cost causation system in which the 
benefits derived from the transmission that the ratepayers are 
charged for is roughly commensurate with the cost they have to 
pay. And as we look at our generic proceeding for transmission, 
the Commission has to bear that in mind because it is a 
fundamental of transmission ratemaking.
    And then, last, very briefly, I see I only have 30 seconds 
left. I am concerned about resource adequacy, specifically 
resource adequacy in our jurisdictional markets. The RTOs 
(Regional Transmission Organizations) and ISOs (Independent 
System Operators) have delivered immense benefits to 
ratepayers, but for those markets to work, they have to be 
designed properly, and I am concerned that incorrect price 
signals in our markets are failing to get the resource adequacy 
necessary--that is to say--the actual quantity of generation of 
the right type to ensure system stability. The Commission has 
to ensure that these markets are competitive so that the price 
signals are accurate and guard against the exercise of market 
power.
    I am two seconds over. Thank you very much.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Danly follows:]

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    The Chairman. Thank you all. I appreciate it. Now we are 
going to start with the questions and I will start with the 
opening questions.
    I am going to ask all four of you the same question. If you 
were rating yourself on how you all work together, looking for 
commonality between zero to 100 percent, how would you rate 
yourself?
    Chairman.
    Mr. Glick. I would rate us 80, 85. I mean, we have our 
differences, but I think, you know, I think we respect each 
other.
    The Chairman. Commissioner Christie.
    Mr. Christie. Well, I taught for a long time and grade 
inflation is real, so I am going to say 90.
    [Laughter.]
    Ms. Clements. I think we're at 80, 85, and just getting 
started.
    Mr. Danly. There's always one. I am not sure it is quite 
that high. Certainly, from my standpoint, I am very concerned 
about the clear, unambiguous letter of the law and the court's 
interpretation of it and so there are times in which I will 
admit that I can have a very clear-eyed view of that. But when 
it comes to the discretionary actions of the Commission, I 
think we get along very well. And I'll point out that 95 
percent of our orders are unanimous. So for the vast majority 
of the work we do, we're of one mind.
    The Chairman. Very good. Thank you, all.
    According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), over the 
last 12 months, the Consumer Price Index for energy has 
increased by 25 percent overall. That includes increases for 
natural gas, electricity, gasoline, and fuel oil. Right now, 
the benchmark Henry Hub natural gas prices are more than twice 
as high as a year ago, over $5 per million BTU, an annualized 
rate equal to $109 billion of increases to the consumers, the 
end users. As I said in my opening remarks, affordability is 
not an option. I am concerned we are on a one-way rise.
    So do all of you want to comment very briefly on how does 
FERC take inflation into consideration when carrying out your 
authorities and determining what is reasonable? Quickly.
    Mr. Glick. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    FERC has authority over the regulation of electricity, 
electricity wholesale markets, for instance, and electric 
transmission and natural gas transportation, but we do not have 
authority over fuel prices, whether it be oil, whether it be 
natural gas, and we take our job seriously in terms of 
regulating electricity markets to make sure, as much as we can, 
that they are sufficiently competitive and the rates that 
resulted are just and reasonable.
    The Chairman. But nothing moves without electricity.
    Mr. Glick. That's correct, absolutely.
    Mr. Christie. Mr. Chairman, I think in every case we do, we 
have to be very, very sensitive to the cost to consumers 
because what FERC does affects retail rates----
    The Chairman. Correct.
    Mr. Christie [continuing]. And that's what flows through to 
monthly bills. So I think cost has to be uppermost in every 
proceeding.
    Ms. Clements. I think the two things we can do are plan 
ahead to save customers money and also encourage competition, 
non-
discriminatory competition.
    Mr. Danly. In the jurisdictional markets, the costs that 
rise because of inflation are inputs to the offers that are 
made by market participants and the contracts are negotiated by 
utilities--or as between them, they are jurisdictional to us--
but they negotiate their own contracts.
    The Chairman. The other question I am going to have is 
concerning Texas, the poster child that we are using, but those 
decisions regarding gas and electricity are being made all over 
our country. FERC's interim report on the 2021 winter storm 
indicated Texas and the South-Central U.S. are heavily reliant 
on natural gas for fueling electric generation to meet peak 
capacity and energy needs. At the same time, the natural gas 
infrastructure is heavily reliant on electric power for 
producing, processing, and transporting natural gas to end 
users. As we all saw, the relationship was managed in February 
in a way that failed consumers drastically.
    So you all have been thinking about gas-electric 
coordination for years. I know that has been going on and we 
know that you all have been talking about it. Why haven't we 
solved the problem yet? Why is it taking so long to get that 
integration done?
    Mr. Danly. We have been talking about it for years. In 
fact, the last concrete action we took--I forget how long ago 
it was, 2016 perhaps--was to implement NAESB standards to get 
the day-ahead--the scheduling fixed between the two. This is 
extremely esoteric material for a lot of the mechanics of the 
interaction between the two of them. But it's a subject that 
we're constantly concerned about and we're working on it 
actively.
    Ms. Clements. We have two important dockets open, Chairman 
Manchin, that will provide more information to allow us to take 
further steps on this interdependence. One is the docket on 
extreme weather and climate change and the other is the open 
inquiry on our certificate statement. So it is in the works.
    When we think about Texas, whether it be in Texas, 
California, New England, across the country, the Gulf Coast, we 
have to think about planning, market design, and reliability 
standards. We cannot just fix one of them. They all fit 
together.
    Mr. Christie. Mr. Chairman, gas-electric coordination has 
been an issue for years because we have such a large percentage 
of our generating capacity in gas. So it is absolutely a high 
priority. I would say in Texas, and I have said this before, I 
think the problem in Texas, and again, it is their issue to 
work out. They are not under FERC jurisdiction as far as their 
rate design and their energy market. I think an energy-only 
market, where subsidized resources are going to always win and 
non-subsidized resources are not going to win, is going to lead 
to an imbalance. And I think that's what happened in Texas.
    Weatherization, of course, was an issue and the gas plants 
needed to be weatherized. But where's the money going to come 
from? The gas producers have to have an incentive to weatherize 
and they've never had one in an energy-only market. So I think 
the bigger problem has been exactly the way the market is 
designed. But again, that's for Texas to figure out. They are 
not under our jurisdiction.
    The Chairman. I understand that.
    Mr. Glick. Mr. Chairman, two issues. One, with regard to 
gas-electric coordination, it is my opinion that the Commission 
has been too deferential. We have only approved changes that 
actually both the gas industry and the electric industry could 
agree with. I think we actually need to bring the two sides 
together and kind of knock heads and suggest we really need to 
make some changes here.
    Second, and most importantly, while we have reliability 
standards for the electric industry, we do not have reliability 
standards for the natural gas industry, including pipelines. I 
think it is something Congress needs to seriously take a look 
at because we saw what happened in Texas and the consequences--
obviously, very severe.
    The Chairman. People are concerned about getting product to 
market, okay? Getting gas pipelines built has been a tremendous 
challenge. They believe that FERC has not been very clear in 
the past about how they work through this process. Knowing up 
front what to expect, making sure that they do not run into one 
thing after another that is added on after they make their 
request for their permit--I am hoping that you are getting your 
act together on that, and providing clarity to the process so 
applicants know what to expect so they can get it done. Or 
reject it. Either way, let them know up front.
    And the biggest thing I hear all the time: how in the world 
could we, as a country, support Russia building the Nord Stream 
Pipeline in Europe while we basically denied the pipeline 
coming from Canada. Has that caused a problem? The product is 
still coming to the market. You can talk about that later, but 
I am just telling you what complaints I hear all the time.
    With that, we will turn to Senator Barrasso.
    Senator Barrasso. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would 
like to follow up on some of those sorts of things.
    Commissioner Christie, at the present time you are the only 
Commissioner who actually has direct experience overseeing 
retail electricity supply and sales. What is likely to happen 
to electric reliability if Congress enacts this so-called Clean 
Electricity Performance Program to force the closure of natural 
gas and coal-fired power plants, the plants that generate 
electricity even when the sun does not shine, the wind does not 
blow. For example, just consider a region like PJM, which used 
to be Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, but it is now 13 
states from the middle of the country to the Atlantic Coast. 
How do they keep the lights on without natural gas or coal-
fired power plants?
    Mr. Christie. Well, right now, PJM couldn't. They are 20 
percent coal, I think about a third gas, and about 38 percent 
nuclear, so they couldn't keep the lights on. My concern about 
any kind of national mandate with deadlines and timetables is 
that the deadlines and the timetables for how you change the 
generation mix do not fit the reality of the facts. And as the 
Chairman said at the beginning, as we go through this 
transition, which everybody wants--this lower carbon 
transition--it is absolutely essential to keep reliability 
uncompromised. And NERC has warned that if you inject 
intermittent resources, of which, of course, wind and solar are 
two examples, if you force intermittent resources at a higher 
percentage than the system can balance and you do not have 
reliable dispatchable resources--gas, coal, nuclear--you have a 
reliability problem. And NERC has warned about that repeatedly.
    So my concern about a deadline for when you have to have a 
certain percentage of a certain generation mix is that it 
doesn't fit the actual technology. Today, we do not have the 
technology to have a 100 percent emission-free grid. We do not 
have that technology. So a deadline of 2030 or 2035, 
essentially, is a gamble that the technology is going to 
develop. We want the technology to develop. So the question 
really is what's the best way to do it? I personally think the 
best way to do it is to pour money into R&D, but that's not my 
call. But if you mandate deadlines that cannot be met based on 
technology, you're going to get reliability problems.
    Senator Barrasso. So you addressed one of the two comments 
that the Chairman raised at the beginning of the Committee 
hearing--reliability. Now I want to ask about affordability.
    Commissioner Christie, what is going to happen to the 
electric bills of our constituents if Congress forces states to 
rely almost exclusively on intermittent wind and solar, and 
won't this just drive costs, especially if we find, as Germany 
has discovered, that we must have backup--natural gas, coal-
fired power plants?
    Mr. Christie. Well, a national standard, of course, is 
going to treat different states differently. We have 50 
different states. Each one has a different generation mix. 
Right now, the generation mix is totally under the control of 
those individual states. So it affects individual states 
differently. I am very familiar with Virginia because I was a 
state regulator for 17 years, and I am very familiar with West 
Virginia because we shared jurisdiction with their largest 
utility. As I said in response to the Chairman's opening, West 
Virginia is 90 percent coal. If a national standard forces West 
Virginia to shut down 90 percent of their generation mix, you 
obviously have a reliability problem. That is not hard to 
figure out. But from a cost standpoint, West Virginians have to 
pay for replacement power. Paying to replace 90 percent of 
their generation mix is going to be extremely costly.
    And also, West Virginia happens to be a vertically 
integrated, cost-to-service state. That means that the 
generating plants that would be forcibly shut down by a 
national standard are in rate base. And so West Virginia 
consumers are going to pay for years to come even though those 
plants are not running. And the same thing applies to Virginia, 
my state. Our largest utility, Dominion, has numerous combined-
cycle gas plants. If you forcibly shut those down, Virginians 
have to pay for replacement power and they are also going to 
pay for the plants because I can tell you, they are all in a 
rate base.
    So different states are affected differently, but for 
states that are heavy on dispatchable resources, like gas, 
coal, nuclear, it could potentially have a very heavy impact, 
certainly, on cost.
    Senator Barrasso. Thanks so much, Mr. Christie.
    Mr. Danly, today's Wall Street Journal editorial, ``Climate 
Policy Meets Cold Reality.'' It is an op-ed. In it, the author 
points out that Europe's rush to renewables is causing prices 
to spike and energy shortages. So you have both. You have 
reliability and affordability issues. The author concludes, she 
says, ``Europe offers a portent of the havoc to come under the 
Biden Administration's policies that aim to shut down fossil 
fuel production and power the U.S. grid exclusively with 
renewables.''
    [The editorial referred to follows:]

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    Senator Barrasso. So if Congress enacts this so-called 
Clean Electricity Performance Program, and it severely 
restricts natural gas production as the House Democrats are 
proposing, will we be headed for higher prices and energy 
shortages, both?
    Mr. Danly. Thank you, Senator.
    I think that it is almost inevitable. I typically do not 
think it is my role to comment on the legislation before 
Congress, but in this case, I want to be responsive to your 
question. The markets that we have, which are organized 
markets, ISOs and RTOs, they cover about two-thirds of the 
population of the United States to deliver their power. These 
are mechanisms that we have very slowly refined incrementally 
over the course of decades. And this--the text of the bill as I 
read it seems to create an incentive and penalty structure that 
would absolutely change and frustrate every subtle expectation 
we have for these slowly developed, incrementally produced 
markets of ours, effectively dropping an H-bomb into the middle 
of them and it will effectively end the markets as being 
anything other than administrative constructs, perhaps for the 
purpose of balancing and dispatch.
    Just, if you'll indulge one minute here--imagine how hard 
it would be when you get a capacity supply obligation, which, 
you know, some are three years ahead, they are three years 
forward--and you got that supply obligation in return for a 
payment when the market cleared and your further bids that you 
make in later auctions are going to then have to not only have 
you figure out what the cost is, but also what your 
competitors--who are bidding in--what their new calculus will 
be, based upon performance metrics that have not even been 
achieved yet. I cannot imagine how the markets could possibly 
take that.
    Senator Barrasso. Thank you.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman, thank you.
    The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Barrasso.
    And now we are going to have Senator Heinrich.
    Senator Heinrich. Well-planned transmission projects tend 
to create net savings for customers. In fact, the NREL 
(National Renewable Energy Laboratory) Seam study found that 
for every dollar invested in transmission repairs, we tend to 
see more than $2.50 in benefits. One of the challenges, 
however, is that the perceived distribution of benefits can be 
quite uneven to various customers across the regions served by 
transmission projects. I wanted to ask each of you: does FERC 
currently have the tools it needs to allocate transmission 
costs equitably across multiple regional beneficiaries?
    Mr. Glick, why don't we start with you and we will just go 
down the line.
    Mr. Glick. Thank you, Senator Heinrich, for the question.
    So the answer is yes. We do have the authority, as 
Commissioner Danly mentioned earlier. We are required by the 
courts to ensure that the cost of transmission is allocated in 
a manner roughly commensurate with benefits. But I think 
sometimes we look at benefits way too narrowly. So for 
instance, generally, if someone receives power from a 
particular transmission line, they're considered a beneficiary. 
But as you pointed out, transmission opens up congestion and it 
allows you to get access to cheaper power, certainly enhances 
greater resilience and reliability, and there is a significant 
number of benefits I think we need to take into account. That's 
what we're looking at in our ANOPR process right now.
    Senator Heinrich. Ms. Clements, did you want to add to 
that?
    Ms. Clements. Thank you, Senator, for the question.
    I think it's important to put a human face on the 
statistics that you just mentioned. In the Midwest, in the 2010 
to 2012 period, the region got together and made a significant 
investment in transmission called the Multi-Value Portfolio 
Lines. To this day, in the cold weather Uri event, those lines 
were protecting customers and keeping the lights on a decade 
later, benefits that were never considered at the time that 
those investments were made. Smartly planned transmission 
brings resilience and reliability benefits to all customers 
across all states. It also provides the opportunities for low-
cost resources to bring down customer costs, not just in states 
with policies promoting those resources, but again, across 
states.
    Senator Heinrich. So your point of view is we should be 
considering things like reliability as a value that 
transmission brings?
    Ms. Clements. Yes, sir. If we do not, we will find 
ourselves in a position 10 years from now where the lack of 
interconnection between regions, between states, is going to 
cost customers a whole lot of money.
    Senator Heinrich. Lengthy timelines for projects that have 
been stuck in interconnection queues are one of the primary 
barriers to deployment of new, clean sources of energy, 
particularly in wholesale markets--PJM, ERCOT, others. A 
Berkeley National Lab study from May 2021 found that in four 
ISOs, the typical duration from connection request to actual 
operation went from 1.9 years back in the 2000-2009 timeframe 
to about three and a half years for those built in the last 10 
years.
    What can FERC do to help make RTO-ISO interconnection 
processes more efficient so that we can get more energy 
deployed faster to meet these challenges?
    Mr. Glick. Thanks for the question, Senator.
    I think what you said is exactly right and the queue 
devices we have in this country are far too long and they are 
obviously causing issues. I think we need to do a couple of 
things. First of all, we need to marry up our transmission 
planning process with the interconnection queue process. Right 
now, they are disjointed, and that's causing the queue process 
to take forever. Second, I think we need to look at the way 
that network upgrade costs are allocated. Traditionally, what 
the Commission has supported is a situation in which the 
generator connected to the grid has to pay all of the upgrade 
costs when there are a significant number of beneficiaries, as 
we just talked about elsewhere. And so that's actually slowing 
down the process. Sometimes these upgrade costs are so 
expensive, it is causing generators in the interconnection 
queue to drop out at the last minute.
    Senator Heinrich. Mr. Christie.
    Mr. Christie. Senator, one thing we need to do is--I guess 
the general term is queue reform--but the number of projects in 
the queue is not the total picture, because of all those 
projects in the queue, some are ready to go, some are not. And 
so I think that the queue needs to start taking into account 
which projects already have a state certificate, which projects 
already have a PPA, a Purchase Power Agreement with a seller, 
so they are already financeable, and start prioritizing which 
projects are, to coin a phrase, shovel-ready, and which ones 
are not and still do not even have financing.
    So I think queue reform includes prioritizing the ready 
projects against the not-so-ready projects.
    Senator Heinrich. Thanks.
    Ms. Clements.
    Ms. Clements. Thank you, Senator.
    I would add to those two comments that we need to have 
states at the table in the conversations, and we have set up a 
joint task force with NARUC, the National Association of 
Regulatory Utility Commissioners, so that we can start having 
conversations about some of the really difficult siting issues, 
which are one of the main delays to getting transmission built, 
together outside of contested proceedings.
    Mr. Danly. I think that one of the easiest things that the 
Commission can do is stop issuing unlawful retractive waivers 
of the queue deadlines, which are the means by which markets 
actually manage their queues. That would be simply us not doing 
something unlawful, and that would be an easy partial fix.
    The Chairman. Thank you, Senator.
    Now we have Senator Lee.
    Senator Lee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks to all of you 
for being here.
    Mr. Danly, I would like to start with you. Senator Barrasso 
referred a few moments ago to the Clean Energy Performance 
Program, which would require increasingly massive amounts of 
our energy to come from low-emission sources, presumably a lot 
of that coming from intermittent sources like solar and wind. 
Now, these types of energy projects often require costly new 
transmission lines to be built to connect the generating 
sites--which are, of course, many--to the consumers. Can you 
explain to us the cost impacts that this might have on 
consumers? In other words, how might consumers be affected by a 
proposal like the Clean Energy Performance Program?
    Mr. Danly. Certainly. So consumers will be, I would 
predict, affected in two ways. The first is that the cost of 
transmission is going to go up drastically because the amount 
of wire you're going to have to string across the country to 
bridge those distances between the remote locations where 
intermittents are and the load pockets is going to be very 
expensive and that will go directly into the customer's bills.
    But the other thing that is going to happen is, there's 
going to be a reliability consequence. As the markets fail to 
produce correct price signals as a result of these new 
incentives and penalties, they are going to fail to accomplish 
the resource adequacy goals that the markets have taken over 
from the states. And when that happens--this is not some 
obscure, you know, part of market design, this has a real-world 
consequence that when we fail to have resource adequacy 
properly achieved by the markets, then the lights do not turn 
on when you need them to. And we have seen this happen in 
California in the not too distant past--price signals failing 
to get the right resources.
    Senator Lee. So as we are building these big projects, a 
small handful of people will make a fair amount of money off of 
it. It sounds nice. In many ways, it is. But you are saying 
customers will pay higher prices?
    Mr. Danly. I believe they will.
    Senator Lee. They will also pay for it in terms of 
diminished reliability?
    Mr. Danly. Yes, that's hard to predict specifically, but 
actuarily speaking, there is greater risk.
    Senator Lee. Reliability is certainly something that FERC 
is charged with looking at and therefore, something we ought to 
be concerned about.
    Now, Commissioner Danly, in its review of natural gas 
pipelines, the Commission may be delaying issuance of 
Certificates of Public Convenience and Necessity due to 
disagreements of what fits within the statutory definition 
within the meaning of reasonably foreseeable. What is the 
appropriate standard that you think the Commission ought to use 
in making these determinations?
    Mr. Danly. So I presume you're talking about how under a 
NEPA review we determine what the significant impacts on the 
human environment are for EISs and EAs? Is that right?
    Senator Lee. Yes.
    Mr. Danly. So what we're required to do under the 
implementing regulations for NEPA is review all--or take 
account of all the significant foreseeable facts in the human 
environment, and in doing so there is a--you'll appreciate 
this--a Palsgraf-style proximity question, how easily----
    Senator Lee. Foreseeability and----
    Mr. Danly. That's right, exactly.
    So if something is not foreseeable in that tort scheme, 
then it just doesn't fall within the compass of the required 
review.
    Senator Lee. Is that the case where all the explosives, the 
fireworks went off?
    Mr. Danly. Yes.
    Senator Lee. It was a big backup.
    Mr. Danly. Yes.
    Senator Lee. I read that in conjunction with the Wagon 
Mound case.
    Mr. Danly. That's right, exactly. Yes.
    Senator Lee. Okay. This is something I am concerned about, 
because if in determining this, you get that wrong, either in 
pursuit of an environmental agenda or otherwise, you could be 
sacrificing other things that the Commission is charged with 
overseeing, including things affecting the price, or things 
affecting the reliability of the grid.
    Commissioner Christie, there has been vocal support for the 
creation of one or more western regional transmission 
organizations or RTOs as they are sometimes described. Under an 
obligatory RTO, could consumers who were in previously 
independent markets that become part of that obligatory western 
regional RTO--could they face increased prices due to the 
renewable energy portfolio commitments made by other states, 
not made by their own elected representatives in their own 
state?
    Mr. Christie. Well, Senator, if I understand your question, 
let me just first say, I think the decision whether a state 
should go into an RTO is purely up to that state. I do not 
think FERC should mandate it and I hope Congress wouldn't 
mandate it, but it should be a state decision. And all the RTOs 
in America are different. I spent 17 years in PJM. That's very 
different from California ISO. So the details of how an ISO or 
RTO operate are going to be worked out, you know, within that 
RTO. One of the issues you have in a multi-state RTO like PJM--
I know from experience--is that you have 13 states and DC in 
PJM. Trying to mesh those public policies is always a challenge 
and you have always got a threat that consumers in one state 
are going to end up paying for the decisions of politicians in 
another state.
    So if the Western states, like yours, want to join an RTO, 
it should be their decision. I would just say look very closely 
at the details before you make that decision.
    Senator Lee. Thank you. I see my time is expired. Thank 
you, Mr. Chairman.
    The Chairman. Senator Cortez Masto.
    Senator Cortez Masto. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 
Commissioners, welcome. Thank you for being here.
    Chairman Glick, let me start with you, and if the panelists 
have any further comments on this, I would be interested to 
hear it. This summer in Nevada, we actually experienced the 
harmful impacts of jet fuel shortages, particularly at Reno-
Tahoe International Airport. And there were multiple factors 
involved, including the increased volume of air travel and the 
strained supplies at airports throughout the West. This 
resulted in airlines limiting the number of passengers so that 
they could fly on extra fuel rather than refueling locally.
    So my question to you is, as commerce returns, what actions 
is FERC taking to help reestablish normal access to fuel among 
the different transportation sectors and then, what more can 
Congress do to assist FERC in preventing future shortages?
    Mr. Glick. Well, thank you very much for the question, 
Senator. And so we did experience some issues this past summer 
and correctly so in Reno. And the reason is by historically, in 
terms of our regulation of liquid fuel pipelines, sometimes 
when there's more demand than the supply in terms of capacity 
on the pipeline, that pipeline capacity is allocated out based 
on historic use, based on the previous year's use. And because 
the airlines didn't have significant demand for jet fuel for 
the previous year because of the pandemic, the airlines 
actually got caught in a situation where they were allocated 
less fuel than they had been in the past. As demand for flying 
increased, especially in terms of certain airports, they ended 
up short and they had to bring in jet fuel by truck and so on 
and there weren't enough truckers and so on. So it was a 
difficult issue.
    I think this issue of historic use needs to be addressed. I 
raised it as an issue at a technical conference we had earlier 
in the year. I think we need a different approach to allocating 
capacity because of the different anomalies, and you have my 
commitment that we will take a look at that, and hopefully act 
before next summer's demand peak.
    Senator Cortez Masto. I appreciate that. Thank you so much.
    And then, to the panel, as we are all aware, the drought in 
the West is not letting up. If anything, it is getting worse. 
It is going to be our norm. And as a result, the Energy 
Information Administration (EIA) recently released a report 
that found that U.S. electricity generation from hydropower is 
expected to drop 14 percent this year compared to the year 
2020. So from your perspective, how can FERC better account for 
drought in future efforts to ensure grid resiliency and 
sustainability? And I will open that up to the panel, if any 
panelists have any comments on that.
    Ms. Clements. I am happy to start, Senator.
    Senator Cortez Masto. Thank you.
    Ms. Clements. Thank you for the question.
    The answer to that question is to plan--understanding that 
the impacts of extreme weather events, the continuing excessive 
heat to be expected now in the West, the impact of that heat 
and that drought on our hydropower reserves, the answer is to 
plan ahead to address that. I think it is really important that 
we live in the nuance of the facts of the energy transition 
which we find ourselves in the middle of. Variable energy 
resources, like wind, solar, and other emerging technologies 
are proven to be reliable resources, that is--real experience--
in normal operating conditions, SPP has 80 percent penetration 
of wind and solar. It is this extreme weather change, the 
impact that stresses the system in ways that we haven't had to 
plan for in the past, that is the issue to be addressed. And 
that's why, I think, this Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking 
that the Commission has put forward to think about how we 
better predict the resources that will be available will take 
us safely through to the other side of the energy transition.
    Senator Cortez Masto. Thank you. Any other comments?
    Mr. Glick. I would just say, Senator, we have authority 
over the reliability of the bulk power system and one of the 
things I think we need to take a look at is requiring utilities 
to plan for--as Commissioner Clements mentioned--to plan for 
climate change. We cannot expect that the generation is always 
going to be there, and it is not just hydropower capacity, it 
is other power plants freezing during very cold weather or 
malfunctioning because of very hot weather. And utilities need 
to take that into account as they move forward.
    Senator Cortez Masto. Thank you.
    Commissioner Christie.
    Mr. Christie. The question you asked, Senator, it 
illustrates how absolutely important it is when you plan for 
resource adequacy that you accurately document what the 
capacity is you're likely to get from resources. And that's 
been an issue in all the RTOs is--you cannot plan on getting 
more actual capacity than is realistic. And that goes to why 
planning--which is absolutely essential, you're right--has to 
be accurate about the resources that you're going to expect to 
get.
    Senator Cortez Masto. Yes, thank you. I really appreciate 
that. Thank you for being here.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    The Chairman. Thank you.
    Senator Lankford.
    Senator Lankford. Mr. Chairman, thank you. Thank you all, 
for your continued service.
    I want to be able to follow up on a conversation, 
Commissioner Danly, that you brought up earlier about the 
environmental impact statements versus the environmental 
assessments. This has been a question from multiple different 
individuals and groups within my state on trying to be able to 
figure out the certainty of where things are going on that. Is 
there something you need to be able to finish out in that 
statement? You raised that earlier on that.
    Mr. Danly. No, I think I made my point from before. I am 
merely concerned that in some perhaps misbegotten desire to 
ensure that our orders are legally durable, unnecessarily, 
because basically, I think that we have been able to deal with 
most of the alleged legal infirmities that have been raised by 
my colleagues on our EAs, specifically as we have for years and 
they've withstood every challenge in court by addressing those 
comments in the order, right? The Record of Decision (ROD), 
which is the consummation of the NEPA process in the case of 
FERC is actually the initial order that we issue. And I do not 
think that it is necessary to go through the process of 
producing EISs that come to the same conclusion that the EA 
did.
    Senator Lankford. Right.
    Mr. Danly. We can handle those comments.
    Senator Lankford. Chairman Glick, this is an ongoing issue 
as well, just the predictability of the process so that people, 
when they are planning capital, know that they are actually 
going to be able to do investment at a time based on what they 
already received. How do you balance that out?
    Mr. Glick. Absolutely, I think you hit on the key word--
``certainty.'' The D.C. Circuit has admonished the Commission 
on three separate occasions just with regard to our examination 
of greenhouse gas emissions. We actually didn't review those 
emissions. We didn't review the significance of those emissions 
and the court said all three times--``We're sending the case 
back to FERC.'' It causes extra delay. We have seen that in a 
bunch of other cases. You look at the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, 
which is probably the poster child for this. This is a 
different agency--the Interior Department. It got it wrong in 
the previous Administration. The court sent it back, added 
several years and extra billions of dollars on to the process--
--
    Senator Lankford. So with that, are you assuming that all 
orders in the future are going to be EIS statements? There 
won't be EAs at all?
    Mr. Glick. No, I think we still go forward with some EAs, 
but if there was any question as to whether there is 
significance of greenhouse gas emissions, the law requires us 
to do an environmental impact statement instead of an EA.
    Senator Lankford. So you think that is going to be closer 
to the default then?
    Mr. Glick. No, I think what we're going to do, hopefully 
pursuant to this Notice of Inquiry process that's been 
initiated, is set up a particular standard, below which a 
certain number of emissions--and I do not know what that is--
obviously, all the commissioners have to agree on that. Below 
which, I think projects can go forward with environmental 
assessments, above which are significant, and then we're going 
to need to consider other issues pursuant to an environmental 
impact statement.
    Senator Lankford. How will you handle social costs of 
carbon scoring or will that fit into this?
    Mr. Glick. Well, we're waiting for guidance from the CEQ 
(Council on Environmental Quality) on that, but the court in 
the Vecinos case that we just issued recently suggests that the 
Commission needed to at least take a look at the social cost of 
carbon in terms of assessing whether the greenhouse gas 
emissions----
    Senator Lankford. Clearly when you get into social costs of 
carbon, you get into lots of different models from lots of 
different places. The people that typically write the models 
for social cost of carbon have a certain view as well of what 
they are taking into account on that. As an independent body, 
how are you going to be able to manage what is the right 
scoring for social cost of carbon?
    Mr. Glick. Well, there is a level of uncertainty, and the 
Vecinos Court pointed that out recently, but we do actually 
have to take that into account and we're waiting from guidance, 
again, from CEQ. But as an independent agency, we're going to 
have to make our own judgment pursuant to a majority vote of 
the Commission.
    Senator Lankford. So this is not an assumption that this is 
going to come down from the Administration and hand you--
``Here's the way to be able to handle social costs of carbon?''
    Mr. Glick. No, the Commission has historically tried to 
follow CEQ guidance on NEPA reviews as much as we can, but no, 
we have to make our own determination.
    Senator Lankford. So Chairman Glick, let me just stick with 
you. FERC trying to be able to issue the revised pipeline 
certification policy statement--there has been some 
conversation about this. When do you think that comes down?
    Mr. Glick. We received a large number of comments for 
reviewing it. I was disappointed, you know, we started this 
process back under Chairman McIntyre several years ago and the 
Commission never moved it forward. So we're trying to move it 
forward now as quickly as we can. I am hoping within months, 
but I do not have an exact timetable for you just yet.
    Senator Lankford. Okay, thank you.
    Mr. Christie, I want to be able to drill down on the issue 
about large transmission lines. Obviously, you have dealt with 
this a lot. I have brought up multiple times the TransWest 
transmission line. There are lots of other ancillary issues 
there, but they have been 14 years in process just to do the 
permit and they have not put up a tower yet. There has been a 
lot of push on having us at 100 percent renewable in the 
generation field by 2035--14 years away from that. Is that a 
realistic time period just based on the permitting process to 
be able to transmit power from long distances and intermittent 
sources?
    Mr. Christie. Well, the problem, Senator, is with these 
long-distance transmission lines that go over multiple states, 
and I have sat on many transmission line cases and actually 
voted for the longest transmission line in PJM today--the TrAIL 
Line--Trans Allegheny Interstate Line. The fact is when you 
cross five or six states with 300 or 400 miles of a 765-kV 
line, they are going to have tremendous opposition. That's just 
political reality. And so you're not going to get many of those 
permitted and it is not because of any conspiracy, it is just 
the political reality that people don't want--you're going to 
have a tremendous political backlash. It is very hard to get 
these interstate lines sited.
    The important thing about transmission is this: if a 
transmission line is needed, then it ought to be built. If it 
is needed to serve reliability, then it ought to be built. And 
I think, frankly, the people in each state are willing to 
accept transmission lines. They are going to be controversial, 
I can tell you. I have sat in high school gyms and been yelled 
at by people that didn't want to look at a transmission line. 
But if the people will accept--if they think that their state 
regulators have done right by them, had a good record--but I 
think, though, that politically, if you try to run a line 
across six states, I think that it is going to be much harder 
politically to get those sited and people are not going to 
really accept the fact that a line like that is needed, 
particularly if it is only going to benefit a special interest 
group.
    Senator Lankford. Great, thanks, and I will follow up with 
questions for the record. Thank you.
    Senator Cantwell [presiding]. Thank you.
    The Chair had to run to another committee and so I am 
helping and calling on myself, as I am next in the queue.
    I do want to thank the Chairman of FERC for mentioning the 
market manipulation authority and the advantages that that's 
given and thank FERC for its uses over time. I do think it has 
really helped in policing the market. As we discuss this larger 
issue of transformation and where we need to go, I want to 
point out that GAO did a 2021 report that said the impacts on 
the grid will cost utilities and consumers billions without 
more significant resiliency investment.
    So doing nothing is going to cost us, and we see that all 
the time. I mean, this research now that says electricity lines 
sag in hotter temperatures and cause fires and the fact that we 
could make them more intelligent than they are. The lack of 
capacity caused lengthy interconnection queues to top 750 
gigawatts in 2020. So there we are with basically congestion 
that could be resolved. We know in Spokane, when we had this 
heatwave, which was record heat for the Pacific Northwest, we 
had the electricity, we just couldn't get it to the right spots 
at the right places.
    And so this is going to occur more and more. And what is 
happening because of this is we are now having the increase in 
electricity costs for consumers because we have not met these 
demands or missed the rural economic development opportunities 
or the job opportunities. I just, you know, come from a very, 
very rich state reliant on electrification and it has paid the 
bills over and over and over and over again. And so I am just a 
big believer in electricity and the investments that we can 
make that make our economy more robust. So we know we now have 
a rapidly electrifying transportation sector. Ford made this 
big announcement today, how they are going to go with even more 
electric vehicles, which would mean roughly 25 percent more 
electricity than we are producing today. So we know that this 
is where we are going so we have to have a grid that is going 
to get the job done for the economy of the future.
    So I would like to discuss a couple of issues. One, this 
notion of installing fiber on top of transmission towers. Not 
only is it an affordable way to transmit mass-amounts of data, 
which I think you need for that automobile sector or smart-grid 
sector or application sector. I have often said this is like 
the operating system of the future. And if we invent it and we 
work on it, and I guarantee you--and it is basically driving 
down cost and giving you more options--everybody will want it. 
So to me, it is as unique as what Ben Franklin contributed. And 
I hope that we will continue to lead in electrification 
technology. But encased fiber, 40 feet in the air, surrounded 
by high-voltage transmission lines--pretty secure against 
physical attacks. So a great concept. But it also provides a 
closed-loop network for cyber communications, which we also 
know, given the Colonial Pipeline and everything else--this is 
just unfair to say that we are going to have a simplistic 
answer to cybersecurity when now utilities are being attacked 
from state actors. These are sophisticated nation-actors taking 
aggressive action toward us. Why? Because this is where the 
money is. This is where the intimidation is. This is where the 
economy of the future is. So you can do a lot of damage, really 
simply.
    And so I would like to--you know, there is a lot that 
lighting up dark fiber and building out OPGW (Optical Ground 
Wire) along our nation's transmission grid could do to improve 
data needed to modernize the system and make our grid more 
secure. So I would like to start. Do you, Mr. Chairman, agree 
that expanding communication capacity and using the grid's 
existing rights-of-way could help provide benefits for 
cybersecurity, grid modernization, and high-speed internet? And 
that is a grant/loan/cost-share EEI has basically talked about. 
There are examples in the Chairman's state, his own state. 
There are great examples of utilities and telcos working 
together. I know in my state, some of the public utilities and 
people are working together. They see the future of the grid 
and they are trying to capture that. So what does FERC have? 
What do we need to do to build out that capacity for the 
future?
    Mr. Glick. So Senator Cantwell, I agree with you 
completely. I think this is the--fiber provides a significant 
number of benefits in terms of use, like cybersecurity, 
certainly bringing up broadband. But I want to point out one 
other issue. You know, we talk about building transmission--we 
need to build a lot of extra transmission--but we also need to 
make our existing transmission grid more efficient. And one of 
the ways we make it more efficient is operating the grid a 
little more dynamically. And in order to do that we need a 
significant amount of additional data--data points--as to where 
the transmission lines are and are they sagging, are they, you 
know, depending on weather changes and other changes to the 
grid. And we're not going to be able to do that, to operate it 
more efficiently and more dynamically without that particular 
data. So it provides significant benefit to have that fiber-
optic capability as well.
    Senator Cantwell. Thank you. I have even heard that people 
say you will be able to hear fire on the lines if you had this 
kind of system in place. And to me, if you could detect, 
instead of what we have gone through in California where you 
either have to preliminarily shut down for days and days in 
advance of a big temperature burst or the after effect. To me, 
having a smarter grid just to deal with fire, it would be a big 
benefit.
    Okay, Senator Marshall.
    Senator Marshall. All right, thank you, Madam Chair, and 
welcome to all of our guests today.
    I just want to make sure you all are feeling the same pain 
that Kansans are feeling from the economic cost of the February 
winter events. I hope that you can feel the same pain that we 
are going to feel for a decade. An average family home, like I 
grew up in, three bedrooms, two baths, natural gas, probably 
about $80, $90, $100 a month. That cost was $2,500 for 
February. And what they are going to do is take that over the 
next 10 years and let people pay off that debt--probably it 
will double the average Kansas family's natural gas bill for 
the next 10 years. And it feels like we are just piling on when 
it comes to energy costs. We are already paying 40 percent more 
at the gas pump and as the Chairman indicated earlier today, 
the cost of natural gas has more than doubled since this 
Administration has taken over. So certainly the cost of energy 
is just through the roof.
    Some small businesses in Kansas--Sugar Creek Beef Packing 
typically pays about $24,000 a month and they got stuck with 
$600,000 that month. So it went from $24,000 on average, you're 
making a business plan, you get a $600,000 hickey. A homeless 
shelter is Kansas usually paying about $2,000 a month. Their 
bill for February was $48,000. This little city of Mulberry, 
not to be confused with Mayberry, but the little city of 
Mulberry typically pays about $2.50 a unit. They were charged 
$330 a unit, a 13,000 percent increase--13,000 percent 
increase. The city of Winfield, a municipality there, typically 
has a monthly bill of $130,000 a month--$8 million--an $8 
million surprise for them.
    You know, the people of Kansas want to know what is their 
Senator doing and FERC would be one of my resources. So I will 
start with the Chairman and--kind of multiple questions here to 
try to answer together. I think what the people of Kansas want 
to know is who made the money? Who made all that money on that 
increase? What has FERC done about it? Is there an 
investigation underway and what would be a reasonable timeline 
for the people of Kansas to know the truth about this? Was 
there price gouging, and who made the money?
    Mr. Glick. Well, thank you very much, Senator. At first, I 
will say that the impacts were horrific and that's--we need to 
think about these types of situations where there are shortages 
and what happens in terms of prices and I want to start with 
jurisdiction. We do not have jurisdiction over the price of the 
sale of natural gas. Congress deregulated that a number of 
years ago. I believe it would be helpful if Congress were to--
whether it give FERC or some other agency some sort of circuit-
breaker authority when there are extreme prices to impose some 
sort of limitations at certain times. I think that would be 
helpful.
    Second, as you mentioned, we do have authority to guard 
against the manipulation of both our electric markets and our 
natural gas markets. We have entered into a number of inquiries 
with regard to alleged manipulation that occurred during Winter 
Storm Uri. Several of them--we found a number of anomalies. 
Several of those particular anomalies, when we investigated 
them, we moved them on to what we call our Investigations 
Office. So we're moving forward and that takes a while, 
unfortunately, because we have to go through a lot of data. We 
haven't made any final determinations yet, but I can assure 
you, to the extent that we do find that there's manipulation, 
we will make sure that----
    Senator Marshall. Who made the money and what is a 
reasonable timeline?
    Mr. Glick. I can get you a list of individual companies 
that reportedly made a significant amount of money. In terms of 
the timeline of the manipulation investigations, I do not have 
a specific timetable for you, but we're moving as quickly as we 
can.
    Senator Marshall. Months? Years?
    Mr. Glick. I am hoping months.
    Senator Marshall. Yes. Mr. Christie, you have been on the 
state end and the federal level. Now, who made some money in 
these events? Is it the pipeline? Is it the people that are 
selling the natural gas at the pump? You know, not specific 
companies, but who benefits from this, a 13,000 percent 
increase? Somebody got rich.
    Mr. Christie. Well, as the Chairman said, the situation 
from February is under investigation by our enforcement 
division and so I do not want to comment on that investigation. 
Your question about who makes the money--it could be traders, 
it could be suppliers. It depends on the facts of the situation 
and what happened in Kansas and Oklahoma and this past 
February, of course, as the Chairman says, is under 
investigation. I think a bigger issue, too, that needs to be 
considered is background, as we go through this transition to a 
different resource mix--lower carbon--gas has to be part of the 
mix and that means gas supply has to be plentiful and gas 
supply has to be transported. You have to transport a product 
before you can use it.
    And so that gets to the market availability of gas. But as 
far as the manipulation of this intense shortage that we had in 
February, that's definitely under investigation--needs to be 
investigated to see whether there was manipulation that drove 
those--that took advantage of that, a very tragic situation.
    Senator Marshall. Thank you, Madam Chair. I yield back.
    Senator Cantwell. Thank you.
    Senator Hickenlooper.
    Senator Hickenlooper. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank all 
of you for being here today but also for your service. Just as 
Senator Marshall pointed out, you guys are right in the 
crosshairs of a lot of the most difficult decisions that are 
going to happen over these next few years.
    I brought an audio-visual--really just a visual. It is out 
of our National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado 
and shows basically the extent of our clean energy resources.
    [The map referred to follows:]

[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Senator Hickenlooper. The blue is the wind. The yellow is 
solar. And then the green--green being the green light--is 
where you have both. As you can see, these are states that are 
Democratic, Republican, really cover a large portion of the 
country. I think this represents a unique opportunity to be 
able to reap the economic and employment benefits of making 
this work. But we only are able to make this work if we link 
our resource supply to our energy demand. And obviously, a lot 
of the questions you are all getting today are on this.
    Chairman Glick, if Congress had the desire to enable more 
transmission buildout, could the creation of a new federal 
siting authority for transmission be an effective policy that 
would help enable that goal?
    Mr. Glick. So there are three general barriers to 
transmission development in the U.S. One of them is siting. One 
of them is cost allocation. The third one is planning. We have 
jurisdiction over the last two. We do not have jurisdiction--
much jurisdiction--over siting. If Congress were to create some 
sort of siting body, that would certainly have some benefits in 
terms of pushing transmission forward. But I would say we also 
have to address planning and cost allocation as well in order 
to get it right.
    Senator Hickenlooper. Right. I think we agree.
    And while we are talking, Mr. Glick, the U.S. was able to 
successfully take advantage of the innovations in hydraulic 
fracturing, and this so-called gas revolution and part of this 
was because of the federal siting authority in terms of gas 
pipelines. Natural gas pipelines clearly propose different 
environmental, human health, and aesthetic challenges than 
transmission lines. Is it therefore appropriate for a 
hypothetical transmission siting authority to potentially have 
correspondingly different guardrails and protections for both 
states and landowners that are existing gas authorities while 
still maintaining its integrity enabling the buildout of new 
transmission?
    Mr. Glick. Well, thank you, Senator, for the question. I 
think there is. I think there certainly are differences. There 
are a lot of similarities in terms of siting the two 
technologies as well. I would say, though, we need to learn 
from the mistakes that the Commission has made in the past 
about ignoring certain parties, not facilitating greater 
participation in our proceedings, ignoring what's required 
under NEPA. We need to do that, whether Congress does that or 
the Commission does that itself in a new transmission siting 
authority. I think we need to learn from that and do better the 
next time.
    Senator Hickenlooper. All right.
    And Commissioner Christie, as a former state regulator, 
what is your sense of this?
    Mr. Christie. Thank you, Senator.
    My sense is the states are not the reason that the lines 
are not getting built. I know we hear a lot of rhetoric about 
how the states are the barriers, they are the ones in the way. 
I will tell you one of the first transmission line cases I am 
aware of when I went on the Virginia Commission was a line that 
ran from West Virginia down into Virginia. It was a 765-kV 
large line. And it was delayed for almost two years and it 
wasn't because of the state commissions. We approved it. West 
Virginia approved it. It was delayed because of federal 
agencies. There were three different federal agencies, Army 
Corps, Forest Service, and there was one more--Fish and 
Wildlife--and they were delayed for various reasons. It wasn't 
the state commissions. And so I think the idea that, well, if 
you just get the state commissions out of the way and create a 
federal authority, you can just get all these lines built, I 
don't think you change the political dynamic that--the reality 
is, again, as I mentioned before, I have sat in high school 
gyms and been yelled at by hundreds of people that didn't want 
to look at a 500-kV line.
    And so you're going to have that same dynamic even if you 
go to federal siting. In fact, I think you're going to have 
less political support for building those lines because they 
can all blame the Washington people, right? It is harder to 
blame your own state officials. And you're from Colorado--you 
know, if the Colorado public utility commission approves the 
line it is going to have a lot more credibility that if 
somebody in Washington says build that line from Pueblo down to 
Albuquerque.
    Senator Hickenlooper. Right. Or from Wyoming out to 
California. That's----
    Mr. Christie. No, exactly.
    Senator Hickenlooper [continuing]. A case in point.
    So I would like to ask you, either Ms. Clements or Mr. 
Danly, if you have any additional perspective or suggestions in 
terms of how we can make these siting necessities more 
efficient.
    Ms. Clements. Thank you, Senator. There are political 
realities to any kind of significant infrastructure investment, 
whether that be on the gas side or the electric side on the 
issues within our jurisdiction. And those political realities 
will be different in all cases. The only way we succeed in 
building out the transmission system, to integrate all the 
resources that are trying to connect and provide customer 
benefits to protect against the impacts of extreme weather and 
the events that need that strengthening of our system, is to 
get buy-in from the parties around the table, whatever that 
line might be.
    So it would be great to have other tools in our toolbox as 
a Commission, but we can have all the tools in the world--if we 
do not have buy-in that this is an important thing that the 
country has to get done to maintain our leadership across the 
world, frankly, going forward.
    Senator Hickenlooper. Mr. Danly, you want to?
    Mr. Danly. No, I have nothing to add to my colleagues on 
this, thank you.
    Senator Hickenlooper. Right, that would be the mythical 
alignment of self-interest.
    Ms. Clements. Yes.
    Senator Cantwell. Thank you.
    Senator Hickenlooper. Thank you, Madam Chair.
    Senator Cantwell. Senator Daines.
    Senator Daines. Thank you, Madam Chair.
    Thanks for being here today. It is good to have you in the 
room.
    FERC is inherently an economic as well as safety regulator. 
Your mission, as given by Congress and explicitly summed up on 
your website is to, and I quote, ``To ensure economically 
efficient, safe, reliable, and secure energy for consumers.'' 
This means that when you are looking at approvals for 
pipelines, for hydro facilities, LNG terminals, your chief view 
is to make sure the projects are safe and they economically 
benefit the consumer. That is a really important mission. When 
Montanans go to turn on their lights or heat their home in the 
wintertime, they expect they are delivered affordable and 
reliable energy. Unfortunately, Democrats in the U.S. House are 
trying to pass their tax-and-spend bill that would include 
provisions that would kill jobs and increase consumers' energy 
costs. Their bill includes new methane taxes and fees as well 
as increasing the royalties on oil and gas development. In 
fact, the new methane tax alone is estimated to increase energy 
prices for consumers by $100 a year. That would be a tough hit 
for many of our low-income and fixed-income families across 
Montana.
    I have a question for all commissioners and that is this--
looking at it from FERC's economic viewpoint and knowing that 
consumers use natural gas in their homes--in fact, 40 percent 
of the U.S. electricity generation comes from natural gas--
would you agree that increases in taxes and fees on natural gas 
production, transportation, and storage will increase consumer 
energy prices and would have a negative impact on low-income 
communities?
    Do you agree with that? Let me ask this. Would anybody 
disagree with that?
    [No response.]
    Senator Daines. So is the silence that you would agree they 
will increase prices?
    Mr. Danly. I think price increases would be inevitable, 
yes.
    Senator Daines. Right.
    Mr. Glick. Senator, if I may?
    Senator Daines. Yes.
    Mr. Glick. We regulate the transportation of natural gas 
but we obviously don't regulate natural gas, you know, produced 
natural gas--the prices that are for sale. But I would say 
certainly that if anybody's costs go up then the tax cost for 
it will go up and the rates will likely go up, but it is not 
necessarily a one-to-one measurement. It depends how 
competitive the market is, what other opportunities there are 
for other sources of energy, for instance, that might be less 
expensive and so on. So it is a little bit difficult to say 
that without knowing what the market is going to look like.
    Ms. Clements. And sir, I would add that one thing that 
comes to mind from the extreme weather event in February is the 
fact that the pipelines performed pretty well. The issues that 
happened were related to the weather--the lack of 
weatherization or failures due to freezing at the well heads 
and the production level and down on the generating side. And 
so when you think about how to make investments that are 
prudent, relative to customers, thinking about reliability 
standards in other areas, some of which fall outside the 
Commission's jurisdiction, are important.
    Senator Daines. Okay. Well, I think as a consensus, you 
raise taxes and fees of natural gas, ultimately the consumer is 
going to end up, most likely, paying more.
    Chairman Glick, many members of this Committee wrote you a 
letter in April requesting the status of over a dozen natural 
gas infrastructure project approvals and asking the Commission 
to quickly process these important projects. As of today, how 
many new natural gas pipelines are currently awaiting approval?
    Mr. Glick. How many new proposals for natural gas--If I can 
get you that for the record--I do not have an exact number, but 
a significant number.
    Senator Daines. Yes, what is your best estimate? I respect 
the fact you want to get the exact number. What is your best 
estimate?
    Mr. Glick. I am going to guess in the neighborhood of 150 
projects, including LNG projects and gas pipeline certificate 
projects.
    Senator Daines. One hundred and fifty. And we have heard 
that approvals are taking longer and we are seeing what is 
going on right now around the world. In fact, just in the last 
48 hours--spikes in natural gas prices. This is related to the 
fact that the wind stopped blowing in the UK. Do you think this 
could, by delaying these projects, could this have an effect on 
price?
    Mr. Glick. So a couple points, Senator, thank you for the 
question.
    First of all, the situation in Europe and in Asia, yes, 
there are certainly increased price pressures and a lot of that 
has to do with their reliance on LNG. And the fact is that they 
had a very hot summer and a very cold winter so they haven't 
been storing natural gas. They have low supplies of natural gas 
and high demand. It is obviously going to increase prices and 
it did increase pretty dramatically. In the U.S., we have a 
much different situation. We have our own. We're not heavily 
reliant on LNG, except for in terms of exports, but not in 
terms of imports to supply ourselves and so I do not think 
you're going to see similar price pressures.
    Senator Daines. Yes, it is just remarkable to me as I am 
watching the dynamics here in Washington that we have 
increasingly more Democrats that are on the bandwagon of 
stopping more natural gas consumption, which I did not think we 
would come to that point in this country, but I think it is a 
real threat to reliable and affordable energy in America.
    I want to switch gears here and talk about hydropower. 
Commissioner Danly, in Montana, approximately half of our 
electricity is generated from affordable, reliable, renewable 
hydropower. I believe that we need to continue to expand 
hydropower throughout Montana and the United States by 
streamlining and expediting hydropower permitting. With my 
support, Congress actually streamlined permitting for small 
hydro projects but I believe there's a lot more we can do. The 
question is, in what ways do you think FERC and Congress could 
help expedite the approval and the development of new 
hydropower facilities?
    Mr. Danly. So thank you for the question, Senator.
    Every chairman that I have worked either under or alongside 
has wanted to make the hydro process more speedy and clear. One 
of the problems, and I think it is necessary to set 
expectations here, is that our authorities under Part I of the 
FPA are pretty broad-ranging and the number of inputs that go 
into a hydro project are huge. We have resource agencies. We 
have various communities and stakeholders that need to have 
input on it. We have the state and local authorities. And so 
there is no doubt that there are efficiencies that can be 
gained in the process, but they are complicated projects that 
have tremendous potential for destruction of property and loss 
of life. So deliberate hydro processes are probably called for.
    The best way to improve it would probably be the inputs 
from the federal agencies because often--I know, I am saying 
that FERC does things faster implicitly here--but often federal 
agency inputs are the problem. And streamlining that process to 
get the single choke-point to get the information to the 
resource agencies could help a great deal.
    Senator Daines. Thank you very much.
    Senator Cantwell. Senator King.
    Senator King. Well, I cannot resist, because you suggested 
one of my favorite mottoes of business, which is you always 
want to have one throat to choke.
    [Laughter.]
    Senator King. And what that means is somebody needs to be 
responsible. So I appreciate your comment. It is a life 
principle that I have lived by for some time.
    Mr. Chairman, first, I apologize for being late. We were 
having another hearing on Afghanistan in the Armed Services 
Committee. We have artificial intelligence, but also an 
inability to schedule Senate hearings so that there aren't 
conflicts.
    I am gravely concerned about the cybersecurity of our 
pipeline system. And as you all know, the pipeline system is 
not really under your purview explicitly and yet, it is really, 
in my view, part of the grid. In New England, over 60 percent 
of our electricity comes from natural gas--all of which comes 
through the pipeline. So if there is a compromise, a cyber-
compromise of the natural gas pipeline system, our electric 
grid is down. And so I would like to ask the Chair and other 
members, if they are interested, how do we deal with this 
issue? I have met with the pipeline industry. They are taking 
steps on this, which I appreciate, but I always follow 
President Reagan's admonition--``Trust, but verify.'' And I am 
not sure we have sufficient verification of the cybersecurity 
of the pipeline system.
    Any of you that want to comment, but I will start with the 
Chair.
    Mr. Glick. Thank you, Senator and I want to start by saying 
I very much agree with your statement. The natural gas sector 
and the electric sector are so heavily reliant on each other 
for reliability purposes. And on the electric sector, as we 
know, we have mandatory reliability standards, and that's not 
necessarily, you know----
    Senator King. But that is my point.
    Mr. Glick. Yes.
    Senator King. You have great standards on the grid side.
    Mr. Glick. Right.
    Senator King. But not on the pipeline side and yet, they 
are----
    Mr. Glick. Exactly, exactly. And as Senator Cantwell and 
you, Senator King, and others have been leading this effort for 
a number of years pointing out that the TSA has authority over 
pipeline cybersecurity authority and not FERC, not the 
Department of Energy. Former Commissioner Chatterjee and I 
actually wrote an Op-ed about this, because it is a serious 
issue, and I think TSA, to their credit, at least now is 
actually considering----
    Senator King. So what should we do? Do we need to change 
the law?
    Mr. Glick. I think we need to do two things. I think, first 
of all, TSA needs to move forward with their mandatory 
standards, but even more so--I think I said this earlier--we 
need to consider mandatory reliability standards for the 
natural gas pipeline industry, and that includes cybersecurity, 
but other standards as well, because we saw what happened in 
Texas. When there are not similar standards on the electric and 
gas side, we see some of the issues that occur. And I think 
Congress at least needs to consider whether TSA is the 
appropriate agency, whether there's another agency that could 
do a better job in terms of imposing mandatory cybersecurity 
and reliability standards in the pipeline industry.
    Senator King. Could you supply this Committee with your 
recommendation to help guide our deliberations on that subject?
    Mr. Glick. Be glad to do so, Senator.
    Senator King. I think this is an absolutely urgent 
question. Any other members of the Commission wish to comment?
    Mr. Danly. Senator, I think that when it comes to something 
like cybersecurity, FERC is probably not the ideal agency to 
take the lead on something that requires nimbleness and 
immediate reaction. The threats that are developed in 
cybersecurity----
    Senator King. You are suggesting that the U.S. Government 
should--is nimble and----
    Mr. Danly. Well, I mean, just because they are nimbler than 
five rate-makers, I mean, it is a comparative that I am using 
here.
    Senator King. Yes.
    Mr. Danly. So that strikes me as being something that would 
be better for an executive agency like the Department of 
Energy, specifically when it comes to this subject. We have an 
Office of Energy Infrastructure Security that constantly deals 
with various jurisdictional entities, does best practices. Of 
course on the gas side, none of that is mandatory. But I just 
question whether FERC itself would be the best agency to 
oversee cybersecurity directly.
    Senator King. Do you agree though that there should be 
greater oversight and standards for the pipeline system?
    Mr. Danly. Yes, I do.
    Senator King. Thank you.
    Thank you, Ms. Chairman. I yield.
    Senator Cantwell. Thank you.
    Senator Cassidy.
    Senator Cassidy. Thank you.
    Mr. Christie, earlier you mentioned, in response I think to 
a question from Mr. Lankford, that it is difficult to get folks 
to agree to permitting when they perceive that the line being 
permitted is for special interest. Can you elaborate? Who would 
be the special interest that somebody in Arkansas may perceive 
as the excuse for a transmission line?
    Mr. Christie. Well, I think obviously, developers--
generation developers, transmission developers--and I am not 
impugning anybody's motives, but the fact is if you build a 
transmission line--essentially a high-voltage line, like a 765-
kV, which is a very--you have high towers, it goes--especially 
if they are greenfield--those are going to be extremely 
controversial and hundreds, even thousands of people are going 
to be opposed to those. Getting those built--and it is 
essential to build them--if they are needed for reliability, we 
absolutely need to build them. But the people who are naturally 
opposed to those very intrusive facilities, I think, are going 
to be much more willing to accept that construction if they 
know, number one----
    Senator Cassidy. Well, let me ask you, because you said 
that earlier.
    Mr. Christie. Yes.
    Senator Cassidy. But I am guessing--my perception, correct 
me if I am wrong--if you have wind in the panhandle of Texas 
and Oklahoma and you need to transmit it to Atlanta, the people 
in Arkansas are going to be wondering--or the people in North 
Louisiana are going to be wondering, why is it coming across my 
state, tearing up forests, wetlands, et cetera? Is that a 
correct analysis of who are the players involved?
    Mr. Christie. Well, without speaking to an individual line, 
I think you're right about the people in the middle between, 
you know, the Alpha and the Omega of the line if it is going to 
run from Oklahoma or West or North Texas to Atlanta. People in 
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are going to wonder why a 
765-kV is being driven through their state. That's just the 
reality of----
    Senator Cassidy. Believe me, I get that.
    Mr. Glick, you had spoken in your testimony of trying to 
address the growing threat of extreme weather. My state has 
been impacted by that with multiple major transmission lines 
collapsed. What is FERC doing that people in my state will look 
at and say, ``My gosh, that's what FERC's doing to prevent us 
from having the consequences of extreme weather?''
    Mr. Glick. So I just want to point out, first of all--thank 
you for the question, Senator--I want to point out first of all 
that we have jurisdiction over the bulk power system and not 
necessarily the distribution system.
    Senator Cassidy. I get that.
    Mr. Glick. And you understand that was where most of the 
issues were, but we do have authority again over the bulk power 
system and one of the things that we're doing is we're looking 
at the reliability standards that utilities currently operate 
under. What we learned from Winter Storm Uri in Texas and 
elsewhere is that there are significant gaps in terms of what 
utilities do and what they should be doing to ensure 
reliability, and given the fact that we're going to have 
increased occurrences of extreme weather, we need to ensure 
through our reliability standards that utilities plan for 
extreme weather in terms of enhancing their grid, making the 
transmission towers more resilient against 140 mile an hour 
storms that aren't necessarily----
    Senator Cassidy. So is that, I am sorry, is that FERC or is 
that my local public service commission that is going to 
require those enhanced transmission lines?
    Mr. Glick. It depends on the transmission line. It is a 
little bit complicated, but some transmission facilities are 
considered part of the bulk power system--our responsibility--
some more of the local distribution----
    Senator Cassidy. So those ones that are made like an 
erector set, which I am told have a stronger wind profile, and 
after Hurricane Laura and the more recent one, Ida, were 
collapsed, as opposed to the ones that look like a thin stick.
    Mr. Glick. Yes.
    Senator Cassidy. Those stood up. These collapsed.
    Mr. Glick. Yes.
    Senator Cassidy. Is that you or my public service 
commission that would mandate an evaluation of whether or not 
those should be replaced?
    Mr. Glick. Primarily, your public service commission. 
Obviously, it is a case-by-case basis, but primarily your 
public service commission.
    Senator Cassidy. Okay.
    Then next, when you do the environmental impact of gas, I 
will ask this to you, Mr. Chairman. There is evidence and there 
is a report out of a national lab here in the United States 
that both on a 20-year and 100-year horizon, gas exported from 
the United States to Europe contributes significantly less to 
global greenhouse gas emissions than does Russian gas. Is this 
taken into account as this analysis is made of the 
environmental impact of our gas production upstream?
    Mr. Glick. So the way the law is structured with regard to 
our approvals of LNG facilities, the Department of Energy is 
actually required to make the determination as to whether the 
export is in the public interest. And in doing so, they do an 
environmental analysis to determine whether the export of 
natural gas produces environmental benefits or adverse impacts. 
We are only required under the law to examine the construction 
and operation of the project. The emissions associated with the 
project----
    Senator Cassidy. And one more thing, really quickly. I was 
told last night by somebody that does a pipeline that he can 
convert his compressors from gas to electric and he could 
decrease his fugitive gas emissions, but it would take him so 
long to get the permit through FERC because he is constructing 
this now originally out of gas power compressors. It would take 
him so long to get that changed through FERC that it is not 
worth it, that he will tolerate the increased emissions 
precisely because of the regulatory delay. Now, is that an 
accurate kind of depiction of what he would confront should he 
ask that request to be made?
    Mr. Glick. Yes, well, first of all, I think it is helpful 
to make those requests. We consider those types of requests all 
the time. I think, actually, if you look at our record, and 
I'll be glad to get you information for the record, I do not 
think that the time we take to approve particular certificate 
applications is much longer than they have been previously. We 
try to do it as quickly as possible. We have a lot of requests 
we have to go through under the law. We're supposed to go 
through various environmental analyses, but we actually try to 
move through it as quickly as possible. And even if I do not 
agree with the case in order, I still bring it up for a vote 
because I think that's a requirement and I will continue to do 
so.
    Senator Cassidy. But how long would it take him to get that 
request through, on average, now?
    Mr. Glick. I have to get you that information for the 
record. But again, I think if you look at it based on previous 
chairs and our current approach, I don't think it's any 
different.
    Senator Cassidy. Thank you, all.
    Senator Cantwell. Thank you.
    I am aware that a vote has started. I think maybe more than 
15 minutes ago. So we need to move fast. Senator King, did you 
have something you wanted to say quickly? Because Senator 
Murkowski has been waiting very, very patiently.
    Senator King. Oh. I'm sorry.
    Senator Cantwell. So we have two members who have yet to 
ask questions. Yes, Senator, I thought maybe you had a 
question.
    Senator King. Building transmission lines is going be a 
huge issue. We have a referendum in Maine right now on a 
project bringing hydropower from Canada to Massachusetts and 
people in Maine are saying ``Why should we have the corridor?'' 
So you are absolutely right about that as a looming, I think, 
major issue.
    Senator Cantwell. Senator Murkowski.
    Senator Murkowski. Major issue. Love the fact that we have 
four of the FERC Commissioners with us and we don't have 
protests. We don't have people screaming out in the halls. This 
is the calm, new FERC. So congratulations to you.
    But as Senator King has pointed out--many, many issues that 
generate their own level of controversy. I have been waiting 
patiently, Madam Chairman. And the beautiful thing is that I 
can hear the responses to the many good questions that 
colleagues have asked. Senator Daines raised the issue of hydro 
and the issues that we face with the FERC in advancing our 
hydro projects. About 20 percent of Alaska's electricity on 
average comes from hydropower, but so much of ours is really 
small. I was out in the Eagle River Valley just last Saturday. 
There is a small project that one guy with a vision is 
developing. Juniper Creek, 300-kW, came online. It is not much, 
but you can imagine the frustration of so many that are trying 
to get these really small projects online, recognizing that you 
have these multiple agencies that you have to work through.
    And so I would love to figure out a way that we can get 
beyond, and whether it is the efficiency issues, the multiple 
layers. Mr. Danly, those were your suggestions. I don't know if 
anybody else has anything that they can provide for the good of 
the order here on smaller scale, really smaller scale hydro, 
and what more we might be able to do to help advance some of 
these projects.
    Mr. Glick.
    Mr. Glick. Thank you very much, Senator.
    So first of all, I want to say I agree wholeheartedly with 
what Commissioner Danly said earlier that a lot of the issues 
associated with the speed, the length of time it takes to move 
hydro license projects is due a lot to other agencies' 
involvements. But I would say that, you know, pursuant to 
legislation that you all enacted a couple of years ago, we do 
have a pilot project with regard to pumped storage.
    Senator Murkowski. Right.
    Mr. Glick. We're dealing with a pilot project with regard 
to developing projects at 900-power dams to try to expedite the 
process. And the problem is, we haven't received too many 
applications yet. And we want to work with the hydro industry 
to do that. But I would also think that with regard to smaller 
projects, we need to consider, maybe, additional pilot projects 
to try to expedite the process as much as we can at FERC and 
try to work with our other agencies like the Interior 
Department and NIST and so on and try to figure out how we can 
break the logjam.
    Senator Murkowski. Well, I like that idea and I am sure 
that we can provide you with some potential pilots.
    The issue of cybersecurity that has been raised by a 
couple--again, this is something that we are very keyed in on 
but again, when you have really small utilities, we all know 
that we want greater oversight, we know that there need to be 
standards, but sometimes with particularly your smaller 
entities, they do not have the up-front capital that is 
available. They cannot make these investments. And so, how do 
we address this? We have a measure, Senator King and I, along 
with the Chairman and Senator Risch, of this PROTECT Act that 
provides incentives for utilities to make the upgrades. Your 
comments on what more we can be doing when it comes to the 
smaller utilities and really--the very same threat that the big 
guys are facing--we face it down here and it has a level of 
impact that is also just really debilitating. So comments to 
that?
    Chairman.
    Mr. Glick. So Senator, again, and I appreciate the 
question. I spent quite a bit of time speaking with your, I 
think, member of your state public service commission about 
this very issue. I know it is a very important issue. I think 
we need to revise the way we and NERC together look at 
cybersecurity threats. For instance, we had these high-value 
facilities and low-impact facilities and so on and we have 
learned through the solar/wind situation and so on that that's 
not necessarily the right metric because low-impact 
facilities--a foreign entity can get into a low-impact facility 
and then infiltrate a higher impact facility associated with 
that.
    I think we need to take a look at where the threats are, 
where the threats are most likely to occur, and try to work our 
standards in a way that really focuses more on that and less on 
these categories that I do not think work anymore. And I know 
it is a big issue with smaller utilities. And I agree with you 
100 percent that we also need to figure out a way to help these 
smaller utilities fund investments because investments aren't 
going to go down. They are going to increase singly, but they 
are going to increase as time goes on.
    Senator Murkowski. And to penalize them when they do not 
have the capital up front--it is not that they do not want to, 
it is just that it is really challenging.
    One last quick question. The Alaska Gasline pipeline--FERC 
is very, very familiar with this project, having had it in 
front of it for years. Of course, we were pleased to see the 
project approved by the FERC last year. But throughout that, a 
lot of questions were highlighted. So I guess the last question 
for you, Chairman Glick, is, you said in 2019 that, ``FERC is 
obligated to consider greenhouse gas emissions and impacts to 
environmental justice communities.'' And so, as you think about 
that in relation to the Alaska project, I guess the basic 
question is, what are environment justice communities and do 
you think that it is just from an environmental or an economic 
perspective for these rural--very rural, very remote 
communities to continue to rely on their fuel source right now, 
which is very expensive diesel-powered generation? How does 
that work?
    Mr. Glick. So thank you very much, Senator.
    First of all, we rely on EPA's regulations to determine 
what an environmental justice community is and isn't. With 
regard to your second question, we are required--whether it be 
an LNG facility or a natural gas pipeline--we're required to 
determine whether the project is essentially in the public 
interest. We look at the benefits of the project against the 
potential adverse impacts to species or the environment or 
whatever else you're taking a look at. And those particular 
issues--about increased access to cleaner fuel, economic 
development in the local community--those are the very type of 
issues that we consider on the benefit side of the ledger when 
we do a public interest analysis.
    Senator Murkowski. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
    Senator Cantwell. Thank you.
    Senator Hoeven.
    Senator Hoeven. Thank you, Acting Chairman Cantwell.
    For Commissioners Christie and Danly, what immediate 
actions should the Commission take to make sure that the 
regional grid operators are retaining sufficient baseload 
generating capacity, particularly during events that create 
stress on the grid?
    Mr. Danly. I'm sorry, Senator. Whom did you specify to take 
that action, just the states or the Commission?
    Senator Hoeven. The Commission.
    Mr. Danly. Okay, I mean, the Commission's powers on the 
subject of generation are limited. The Federal Power Act 
restricts to the states and leaves that residual power to 
choose generation to them. Our powers relate to ratemaking, and 
we have to ensure, as I said in my opening comments, that the 
price signals in our markets properly compensate generators to 
retain the ones that already exist and attract new investment 
for new generation. But we do not directly select the 
generators.
    Senator Hoeven. So it is of no interest to you, grid 
resiliency is totally up to the states, it is of no interest to 
you. There is nothing you should do about it.
    Mr. Danly. So Senator Hoeven, you and I have had this 
extended colloquy and you and I both agree that there is a 
problem here. I think that if we march ahead with the change in 
the composition of the generation fleet, as we have been, as it 
looks like we're doing, I think that resilience and reliability 
will be very badly impaired. And I think there will be 
catastrophic consequences.
    Senator Hoeven. I like that answer a lot better.
    Mr. Danly. But that doesn't mean that I believe that FERC 
has the power, sir.
    Senator Hoeven. Well, I got that on the first question, or 
the first part of your answer.
    Mr. Danly. Yes.
    Senator Hoeven. I got that. The second part, I think is 
right on the money. Thank you for that, Commissioner.
    Mr. Danly. Yes, Senator.
    Senator Hoeven. Commissioner Christie.
    Mr. Christie. Well, Senator, if a state is not in an RTO, 
of course, it is up to the state. The resource adequacy is up 
to the state and even in the RTO, it is up to the state. Now, 
Mr. Danly is right. In those RTOs that set rules for where 
their capacity markets are going to run, those markets need to 
be non-discriminatory, non-preferential, and they also have to 
make sure that the planning is done to make sure that they have 
sufficient dispatchable resources to meet the need. You cannot 
do it all with intermittent, but it is going to be a mix. And 
as we go through the transition, it is going to be a mix of 
both. But the RTOs have a much bigger role in that than, 
obviously, states that are not in RTOs.
    Senator Hoeven. Certainly, the RTO has a role, no question 
about it, but you would also share the concern that we have 
grid resiliency for efforts, for times it puts stress on the 
grid, for the well-being of state, region, and country. 
Wouldn't you agree with that?
    Mr. Christie. Well, absolutely, I mean reliability means--
here's what it really means: it means the lights are on 24 
hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Anything less than 
that is insufficient. That's not what Americans expect. And so, 
we have to have a generation mix that can produce that 24/7/365 
standard.
    Senator Hoeven. Right on.
    Also for you two, should developers expect to complete a 
full environmental impact statement for new projects moving 
forward?
    Mr. Christie. You mean a transmission developer?
    Senator Hoeven. Yes.
    Mr. Christie. You know, I do not think we have had a case 
where that came up where the NEPA required a transmission 
developer. So I really don't want to comment on that since we 
haven't had a--and here's the thing, Senator--a transmission 
line is going to be permitted at the state level.
    Senator Hoeven. Well, it is my understanding that the 
Chairman now is requiring environmental impacts for a project 
to move forward.
    Mr. Christie. Well, that's for gas. I think that, you know, 
gas is under our jurisdiction. I think----
    Senator Hoeven. Okay, well, I'm sorry, I should have said, 
excuse me--for gas.
    Mr. Christie. Yes, transmission is under state permitting, 
you know.
    Senator Hoeven. Yes, I'm sorry. For gas.
    Mr. Christie. Well, that gets back to what the Natural Gas 
Act requires and also what NEPA requires and that's an 
ongoing----
    Senator Hoeven. Should the FERC require an EIS for a gas 
pipeline?
    Mr. Christie. I think FERC ought to require what the law 
requires. Now, whether an EIS is required in every case, I 
cannot give you a definitive answer on that because it is 
still, frankly, under----
    Senator Hoeven. So you are saying it is not up to FERC--
they shouldn't require an EIS for a gas pipeline.
    Mr. Christie. I cannot say in every case that it is 
required because that's something that's under litigation right 
now.
    Senator Hoeven. Thank you.
    Commissioner Danly.
    Mr. Danly. What is required under the implementing regs for 
NEPA is that if there is a significant impact, then an EIS is 
required, but an EA can do the initial review to determine the 
severity of the impact. And so, in conducting all NEPA under 
the CEQ regs, there is a rule of reason that compels the action 
of the agency and you do as little work as you possibly can to 
get the fastest answer from government you can get.
    Senator Hoeven. Thank you, Commissioner. I appreciate that 
answer.
    Chairman Glick.
    Mr. Glick. I think Commissioner Danly is correct in terms 
of how we characterize the law. I think the problem is that the 
courts keep on telling us that we keep on getting it wrong and 
we're not expediting things, what we're doing is delaying 
things. Because every time we're supposed to perform an EIS and 
we prepare an EA, we just ignore climate change altogether, the 
courts say you got it wrong. You have to do it all over again. 
That costs billions of dollars and extra time for these 
pipeline projects. And I think certainty is much more important 
than trying to decide whether we can do something quickly and 
do it on the cheap. Every time we do it on the cheap, the 
courts tell us we got it wrong.
    Senator Hoeven. In that context then, I mean, it takes much 
longer now to permit these gas pipeline projects than it does 
to build them. Can you help expedite that? Because we have 
situations where it is in everybody's interest, including 
better environmental stewardship, to build a pipeline. We have 
to be able to do it.
    Mr. Glick. And we are attempting to expedite the process, 
Senator, and thank you for the question. You know, I think one 
of the things--we had a discussion about this several months 
ago--we were trying to prepare supplemental environmental 
impact statements where we see--as opposed to drafting a whole 
new big environmental impact statement on everything, we move 
forward as quickly as we can. Some of these projects are moving 
forward and we'll be considering them very shortly. But again, 
if we cut corners, all the courts are going to tell us to do is 
go back to the drawing board.
    Senator Hoeven. But it is your intent to try to get these 
things done as--I mean, properly--but as expeditiously as we 
can?
    Mr. Glick. Everything before us as expeditiously as 
possible. That's my motto.
    Senator Hoeven. Thank you, I appreciate it.
    Mr. Danly. Senator, can I say one thing on this subject, 
which is that there is a difference between a failure by an 
agency to properly conduct a NEPA review, which would be in the 
EA or the EIS, and a problem from the agency from an 
Administrative Procedure Act (APA) standpoint to properly 
explain the decisions that it made, partially informed by that 
NEPA document. In almost all of the cases where FERC has been, 
in one way or another, remanded, those cases are not because of 
failures in the NEPA document, they are failures of reasoning 
under the Administrative Procedure Act. It is basically the 
court saying that you did not sufficiently explain the reason 
why you made this choice, connecting the choice made to the 
facts found. And so saying that we can fix that problem of APA 
violations by having different or more robust NEPA review is 
simply not the reality of the remands we have gotten from the 
courts. And I feel it is necessary to tell the Committee that. 
Thank you.
    Senator Hoeven. Thank you, Commissioner Danly. Also, I have 
some questions for Commissioner Clements, but I'll submit the 
rest for the record in the interest of time, Mr. Chairman, and 
I do thank all of you for your responses. I appreciate it.
    Senator Barrasso [presiding]. Thank you, Senator Hoeven.
    Just another number of quick questions.
    Commissioner Danly, in my understanding, both private and 
public investors build and operate electricity and natural gas 
projects in accordance with a whole series of contracts, and 
you mentioned that earlier. These contracts determine how, 
whether, and when a project can be built, when it can be turned 
on, and continue to operate. So if Congress enacts this so-
called Clean Electricity Performance Program, as House 
Democrats have proposed, what is the likely impact on existing 
contracts?
    Mr. Danly. Thank you, Senator.
    So you're asking about the current contractual 
relationships, right?
    Senator Barrasso. Yes.
    Mr. Danly. I alluded earlier to what I thought the 
consequences of this legislation would be for the markets, but 
for the entire rest of the country that isn't in markets, 
that's governed by a series of very complicated, interacting, 
bilateral and multilateral contracts, usually that are entered 
into for very long periods of time--decades. If the revenues 
that people can expect if they meet the performance standards 
or the penalties that they can expect if they fail to meet them 
then get applied to those contract holders, you are going to 
find that a huge number of parties and counterparties will 
either be unable to perform under the contract terms and then 
suffer the penalties specified, or they may actually find that 
rational breach of those contracts is in their business 
interests and then they will intentionally not fulfill those 
contracts because they have separate revenue streams that will 
be more lucrative to them. That is the ineluctable affect of 
the market forces that will be created.
    Senator Barrasso. So then, it is fair to say that this 
legislation, which the Democrats are proposing in the House, 
would result in a tidal wave of disputes, lawsuits, and 
ultimately hurt American consumers and the economy?
    Mr. Danly. As I said before, nobody has a crystal ball, but 
it seems like that can be expected. The point is, if the 
legislation goes into effect as written, the consequences are 
going to be profound, they are going to be disruptive, and at 
the moment, they are basically incalculable. And I think it is 
worth pointing out--and I do not want to make this sound like a 
plea for mercy--but even though we have virtually no role in 
implementing any of what's in that bill, FERC, as a practical 
matter, is going to be the forum in which all of those disputes 
are going to be adjudicated when it comes to our jurisdictional 
contracts. I mean, there will be residual state contract 
issues, of course, but FERC is going to have to do a lot of the 
cleanup for what I think are the inevitable consequences of 
this.
    Senator Barrasso. Thank you, Mr. Danly.
    Chairman Glick, I agree with you that safeguarding the 
reliability of the electric grid should be one of FERC's top 
priorities. Enabling power plants to have access to plentiful 
supplies of natural gas is essential to electric reliability. 
So if FERC fails to permit new natural gas pipelines or 
upgrades of existing pipelines in a timely and a predictable 
manner, won't that put electric reliability at risk?
    Mr. Glick. Thank you for the question, Senator Barrasso. So 
first of all, I think that you can't answer the question 
generally because you have to take these issues on a case-by-
case basis, but there are several cases in which the courts, 
most recently on the Spiro case, in which the court told us a 
project is not needed. That's one of our responsibilities. FERC 
is supposed to ensure that there's sufficient natural gas and 
sufficient natural gas transportation capacity around the 
country, but one of the things the statute tells us, natural 
gas tells us is--is the project needed?
    And so first of all, that's what we have to determine--
whether there's a need for the project, and not based on some 
sort of contract between affiliates, whether there's true need 
for the project--and in that case, I will, on a case-by-case 
basis, determine that if there is, in fact, evidence in the 
record to suggest that additional natural gas capacity is 
needed for reliability reasons, personally, I will conclude 
that the project is needed.
    Senator Barrasso. So Mr. Danly, recent events in California 
and Texas have shown that reliable, affordable natural gas is 
essential for families to heat and power their homes, their 
state, local governments to provide public services, and 
Americans to operate their businesses. Are you concerned that 
the Commission's failure to act on pending applications for 
natural gas pipeline certificates will put reliable, affordable 
prices for electricity and natural gas services at risk?
    Mr. Danly. Yes, Senator. And it is not only the fact that 
there is a delay in a handful of the cases pending, it is also 
the uncertainty created by the recent issuances by the 
Commission.
    Senator Barrasso. And then, Chairman Glick, again, I have a 
series of just general statements for you that do not pertain 
to any particular matter before you, but please just let me 
know if you agree or disagree.
    Private sector investors, who put up their own money and 
expect a reasonable return, finance most long-term energy 
infrastructure in the U.S. Agree or disagree?
    Mr. Glick. Agree.
    Senator Barrasso. Okay.
    And the Commission's obligation is to balance the needs and 
interests of investors and the public. Agree or disagree?
    Mr. Glick. Agree.
    Senator Barrasso. Okay.
    Investors need regulatory certainty. Agree or disagree?
    Mr. Glick. Wholeheartedly agree.
    Senator Barrasso. And the Commission introduces uncertainty 
for investors if it calls into question its final orders, 
especially final orders which have been upheld on appeal.
    Mr. Glick. If orders have been upheld on appeal that's one 
thing. I think when the Commission--the Commission hasn't ever 
done that. But if the courts question what the Commission has 
done and say it is not sufficient, the Commission didn't do 
something sufficiently, whether it be a NEPA review or a need 
finding--we're actually discouraging investors from investing 
in the market because they have no certainty. That's why we 
need to do it right the first time.
    Senator Barrasso. And final question, Mr. Chairman.
    Commissioner Danly, as you noted in your prepared remarks, 
the U.S. Supreme Court has said that the principal purpose of 
the Natural Gas Act is to encourage, ``The orderly development 
of plentiful supplies of electricity and natural gas at 
reasonable prices.'' The court has described the same purpose 
for the Federal Power Act. In your view, is the Commission 
doing all that it can to fulfill the purpose of these two 
statutes, and if not, what more should the Commission be doing?
    Mr. Danly. I think, Senator, that the Commission is failing 
to properly oversee our markets to produce the correct signals 
that will incentivize the arrival of much-needed generation in 
various regions, and then also, I think that we are creating a 
climate of uncertainty that makes it impossible to rationally 
deploy capital to build out the natural gas infrastructure that 
the electric system and people need.
    Senator Barrasso. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. No further 
questions.
    The Chairman [presiding]. Thank you, Senator.
    My final two questions will be to whoever would want to 
respond on these, okay? I believe that all of you agree that 
more regional and inter-regional transmission lines will be 
needed to facilitate clean energy and to improve the grid's 
resilience and reliability. The recently noticed rulemaking on 
transmission planning confirms that, but yet FERC recently 
reversed course and has proposed sunsetting after three years 
the return on investment--the adder transmission owners can 
access as an incentive to join their regional transmission 
organizations, the RTOs.
    So the incentive adder was directed by Congress as part of 
the Energy Policy Act of 2005 as a compromise short of 
mandating RTO membership. That was the sweetener. Joining an 
RTO remains voluntary, but I know that PJM and other grid 
operators are concerned that eliminating this sweetener will 
mean transmission owners may elect not to join or not to stay 
in the RTO, which could significantly reduce the reliability 
benefits that RTOs can provide and do provide. Does anyone have 
that same concern that I have?
    Yes sir. Chairman.
    Mr. Glick. Mr. Chairman, if I can. So I think you're 
exactly correct. The statute, which was enacted in 2005, tells 
FERC to give incentives to transmission owners that join RTOs 
and I think there are significant benefits with RTOs and 
consumer savings, reliability, resilience, all the rest. But 
the incentive is only to join, and if we provide incentive, 20 
years later, if we just continue to provide the same 50-basis-
point, 100-basis-point adder, 20 years later, that no longer 
becomes an incentive. We're also supposed to--you mentioned 
earlier, affordability. We have to guard and ensure that the 
consumers are adequately protected. I think if Congress wanted 
to amend the law and say they should provide an incentive for 
staying in an RTO and being in an RTO, that's one thing. But I 
think the way the statute is written currently, we have no 
choice but to cut off the incentive at some point.
    Mr. Danly. So Senator Manchin, the language of the statute 
is to give incentives to utilities ``that join.'' That is a 
demonstrative. It is not a ``to join.'' And further, the 
statute specifies that we're supposed to do as much as we can, 
I mean, it is very broadly written----
    The Chairman. So hold on. You're saying ``that join'' or 
``to join?''
    Mr. Danly. ``That join.'' It says ``that join''----
    The Chairman. So that's all new. That's not existing. 
That's new.
    Mr. Danly. No, no, no. It means those that join should be 
given the incentive. And so, having this idea that it is 
appropriate to limit it, I do not understand. I dissented 
vigorously on this. If you want to have RTO membership--and 
what you, Congress, want to do is encourage it--it is worth 
keeping in mind two things: It is not only an inducement for 
people to join, but it is also an inducement for people to 
remain. And as long as the utilities have the privilege of 
exiting RTOs, the limit on the RTO adder is going to encourage 
an earlier exit, all things being equal. So I think it is very 
bad for the project of trying to encourage utilities to----
    The Chairman. Do you think the language of the code needs 
to be changed?
    Ms. Clements. Chairman Manchin, as a practical aspect of 
this, we have two responsibilities under the Federal Power Act. 
One is to retain reliability and one is to protect customers.
    The Chairman. Right.
    Ms. Clements. We should be incenting things that are hard 
to do. So that when we are building out our system, we're 
protecting customers in the process. As you described this RTO 
adder, a sweetener, it is not hard to join an RTO. In fact, 
RTOs have been saving customers billions of dollars year after 
year after year for several decades now. We should be thinking 
about what are the things that are really hard to get done--
what are the things that we need to help utilities do that 
require incentives? Once you have been in an RTO past some 
number of years, it is not hard to keep saving customers money. 
So what I think the important piece to talk about is how we get 
the hard things done.
    The Chairman. Is there more incentive for them to move on? 
Is it more profitable for a transmission owner to move on to 
independence, basically, for profit reasons?
    Ms. Clements. I wouldn't vouch to speak for any particular 
utility, but my guess would be no, and I think, certainly, the 
utility commissions and governors of states where those RTOs or 
utilities live might have something to say about that.
    The Chairman. Commissioner Christie.
    Mr. Christie. I would say this, Mr. Chairman, on the issue 
on whether the law actually requires an RTO adder as opposed to 
an incentive, I would agree with the Chairman on this. I do not 
think it mandates an RTO adder, specifically. I think it is 
incentives, generally. And I would say this, there's not a 
utility in America in an RTO that is not there because either 
(A) the state mandated it or (B) the utility went to their 
state regulators and asked to join, as our utilities in 
Virginia asked to join PJM.
    So they made a decision to join the RTO and the problem I 
have got with it, with an adder, and I am not going to prejudge 
the case because it is actually still open, but an ROE is the 
cost of capital. It is the market cost of equity. And so an 
adder, by definition, is above the market cost of equity, and 
who pays that? Consumers pay that. And you know, in your 
opening remarks, you talked about the need to be sensitive to 
consumers and I take that very seriously. And I think that that 
is implicated here when you talk about an adder to an ROE 
because consumers are going to pay it.
    The Chairman. Do you all have any consensus right now? You 
do not, but do you have a way to have a consensus around a 
language change, code change, things of that sort that would 
keep people in the RTO? I understand three of you do not 
believe transmission owners are going to leave the RTO?
    Mr. Christie. Do not believe what, Senator?
    The Chairman. That transmission owners are going to exit. 
They are not going to exit? Okay. Do you all three believe that 
that won't happen because there's too much incentive and 
benefits to the consumers?
    Mr. Danly. I do not agree with my colleagues. I think that 
there is a greater, ever-growing chance that RTOs will unravel 
and that the transmission owners will leave. I am not saying 
that's going to happen imminently----
    The Chairman. Yes.
    Mr. Danly [continuing]. But I think it is getting closer.
    The Chairman. Let's use Texas as the model of what we 
should be looking not to do, right? We all agree on that? That 
Texas being not----
    Mr. Christie. I wouldn't structure my energy market the way 
Texas does, no, sir.
    The Chairman. No, I know that, but I am saying basically 
what happened with Texas with no reliability, no backup, not 
hooked in, no oversight--maybe we could have caught that, maybe 
we could've stopped that and prevented it.
    Ms. Clements. This increasing new normal of extreme weather 
that hits all of our states.
    The Chairman. Sure.
    Ms. Clements. The idea of not being interconnected to your 
neighboring systems----
    The Chairman. Right.
    Ms. Clements [continuing]. Through coordinated integration 
that both allows for the sharing of resources that saves 
customers money and protects customers in these dangerous 
situations, is a really compelling reason to stay connected.
    The Chairman. Commissioner Danly, then I would ask you, 
what would the incentive need to be then if all these risks are 
out there and if the sweetener goes away?
    Mr. Danly. Well, what would be the incentive for them to 
leave?
    The Chairman. Right.
    Mr. Danly. It is that the burdens of being a transmission 
owner within an RTO are simply too high to justify remaining. 
They would have to pay a whole lot of money to leave. This we 
have seen before when utilities have left RTOs. But if RTOs are 
so great, and everybody wants to be part of them, why are there 
entire regions of the country that have simply refused to even 
consider the idea? I think we can see in front of us 
empirically that the promises of RTOs make sense for some 
regions and not for others. And to the extent to which Congress 
wishes to incentivize utilities to join them, it has to 
actually take action to, otherwise it would have happened.
    Mr. Glick. Mr. Chairman, if I may.
    We only give the incentive to actual utilities that 
voluntarily join an RTO. If a state tells them to join an RTO, 
they are not eligible for the incentive, pursuant to court 
decision. And all the utilities that are required to----
    The Chairman. When I was still Governor, I would tell my 
utilities that I am not mandating you, just go ahead and do it 
and get the money.
    [Laughter.]
    Mr. Glick. But in some states, like Ohio, for instance, 
where the state requires you to participate in RTO----
    The Chairman. Sure.
    Mr. Glick [continuing]. You do not see anyone leaving, I 
mean, basically----
    The Chairman. Well, they can't if you mandate them.
    Mr. Glick. Well, they can't, but they also talk about all 
the benefits they get from participating in the RTO.
    The Chairman. Sure.
    Mr. Glick. And I do not think we'd see anyone leaving.
    The Chairman. It is a good discussion. And I can understand 
that your discussions could be lively. That is good. Maybe we 
need a fifth one here, huh, real quick?
    Mr. Glick. Absolutely.
    The Chairman. Let me just thank you all. You all have been 
most professional and I appreciate it and I think most 
amicable. And I think there is a good collegial mix here. It 
really is, and that is good.
    Mr. Danly, I know that you are kind of on the fringes--on 
the other side--and that is good, too. We need--and I mean 
that--trust me, I know how you feel.
    [Laughter.]
    The Chairman. So I am saying that with reverence.
    Mr. Danly. I appreciate that. Thank you.
    The Chairman. But the bottom line is we have to find 
consensus and move forward. And I am concerned about the clean 
energy standard. I am not asking you to comment on it, I am 
telling you the concerns I have about paying utilities to do 
what I think they are going to do anyway. I looked at the 
transitions going on now and what has happened since 2000 to 
2020--we have transitioned to a completely different delivery 
system and we did not pay the utilities to do it.
    If they are going to do anything with utilities and 
transmission, I know a little bit about transmission, there is 
an awful lot of money to be made in transmission, probably more 
money in transmission than there is in generation. And with 
that being said, if you want to build a line, you better share 
a little bit of the revenue. Do not tell me that ``everyone is 
stopping you,'' because I put in a procedure called Kilowatt 
Mile so we would share with the counties or the municipalities 
the line went through. That takes care of all the problems. 
Everybody benefits in that.
    But for new lines, I said, I will give you a loan. The 
Federal Government should give a loan to go out in the desert 
for wind, solar, whatever it may be, until the time when that's 
going to end up being profitable. I am taking all the risk away 
on the front end, but when it is interconnected and starts 
making money then the Treasury should get its money back. That 
is the only thing I have said. They want to give it just 
strictly as a grant up front, and that, to me, makes no sense 
whatsoever. And I just cannot, for the life of me, keep writing 
checks from our Treasury to publicly traded companies that have 
shareholders that are basically benefiting from the investments 
we are making with no return to the taxpayers. That is the 
biggest problem I have.
    So I will be calling on you all to help me through this. If 
it is there and the customers are demanding it, then 
transmission lines will get built. I think, Mr. Christie, you 
made this statement, and I agree wholeheartedly, that if we pay 
utilities incentives to basically change their portfolio by 
2030, reliability will be the loser. Reliability could be the 
big loser because we are moving faster than we should and I 
guarantee you, the utilities will take every dime you want to 
give them, but they will not commit and be held accountable for 
reliability. And then they are going to have to buy it 
somewhere and the consumer is going to pay. That is my problem. 
That is my big problem. And in my state, Mr. Christie, you hit 
it. What are we going to do? Ninety-three percent reliant on 
coal? I have said this--if a coal plant does not have 
scrubbers, low NOX boilers, bag houses for mercury, 
they shouldn't be operating. That technology is available. 
Until we can do carbon capture and until we find out a way to 
have carbon utilization through some type of technology that we 
come up with that makes it feasible, it makes it very 
difficult. But there are not that many states left that are so 
reliant on coal, like mine, I do not believe, are there? You 
all would know that better. PJM?
    Mr. Christie. West Virginia has the highest percentage of 
coal----
    The Chairman. That's what I am saying. So our transition is 
going to be different, but I can tell you, the transition is 
going to happen and people in West Virginia realize that. Just 
do not leave us behind. There has to be something. We can do 
something.
    So I am trying to get the legislature in West Virginia to 
change their code so we can build nuclear. I have the perfect 
platform for nuclear, basically where the old coal-fired plant 
was. Transmission and connectivity are there and we cannot even 
use the site for nuclear yet. So we have all got to get 
together, but you all can be tremendously helpful. You all have 
an extreme amount of knowledge on this and I think you have the 
desire, all of you seem to have that passion and desire. I see 
it coming out when everybody wants to jump up and that is all 
good. That is really good. And we hope we can get you another 
FERC nominee as quickly as possible. There will be five of you; 
that will be a full, working FERC.
    So with that being said, I want to thank you all again, I 
appreciate it very much, and our members will have until close 
of business tomorrow to submit additional questions for the 
record.
    The Committee stands adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 12:19 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

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