More planning, fewer incentives, and a black swan on the horizon.
David Raskin is a partner with Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C.
More than a decade ago, before passage of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, I was consulting with a utility holding company that was thinking about splitting off its transmission assets and creating a business unit to invest in transmission within and outside its service territory. The CEO, after listening to the conversation for a while, drew a sharp contrast with natural gas.
The pipelines, he noted, enjoyed strong and widespread political and regulatory support for network expansion. But what about the electric grid; are policy makers blind to the value that electric transmission also can provide to society?
He suggested that we think about ways to educate policy makers about the importance of transmission in order to place it on an equivalent plane with natural gas pipelines as an investment option.