Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) speaks during a press conference, September 20, 2022, at the Capitol in Washington.
Angered by a pre-election presidential swipe at the coal industry, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has taken a hostage. Revealingly, that hostage is a chief architect within the executive branch of energy permitting reforms, which is supposedly a top priority of Manchin’s. (He recently sponsored a reform package that Republicans blocked.)
Late last week, Politico reported that Manchin would not hold a nomination hearing for Richard Glick, the current chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Glick’s term expired in June, and without confirmation by the end of the year, he would have to step down from FERC, leaving the agency deadlocked between Democrats and Republicans.
That could stall out the work FERC is doing on accelerating the electricity transmission build-out, which is generally seen as among the biggest challenges to the green transition. If more transmission lines cannot be built to move renewable energy from where it is produced to where power is needed, much of the clean-energy benefits from the Inflation Reduction Act will be lost, and hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gases that could be avoided will be emitted per year.
Manchin conditioned his support for the IRA on getting a vote for his permitting reform bill. Ultimately, he pulled the package from the continuing resolution to fund the government in September because it didn’t have the votes. Manchin has talked about adding permitting reforms to the defense policy bill, which passes Congress every year.
The permitting package Manchin introduced earlier this year included electric transmission reforms that would give FERC “siting authority” to approve the construction of transmission lines (even over objections of regional planners) if they are deemed in the national interest. FERC has no such preemption authority now for transmission; it does have it for natural gas pipelines. The permitting bill would also allow FERC to undertake all environmental reviews for transmission projects, and to allocate the costs of such projects unilaterally.
This would hand FERC a considerable amount of power, which would all go to waste if the agency mired in gridlock because the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—Manchin—refused to confirm its leader in a fit of pique. Even without new powers, Biden’s FERC is actively working to accelerate transmission permitting, which Manchin’s maneuver would also hamper.
The situation calls into question whether Manchin cares all that much about bolstering domestic energy production, or if he is more myopically interested in getting particular fossil fuel projects in West Virginia approved and built, over local objections. At any rate, it’s hard to say he’s a sincere believer in improving transmission build-out, when he’s stalling its biggest champion in the government.
Manchin spokesperson Sam Runyon would only give the Prospect a brief one-line statement about the Glick nomination and its impact on permitting reform, one he has given other outlets. “The Chairman was not comfortable holding a hearing,” Runyon said in an email.
GLICK HAS BEEN FERC CHAIR since President Biden took office. He has convened task forces of state regulators to coordinate transmission planning that would cross state lines. In April, FERC issued a notice of proposed rulemaking on transmission, which would require better long-term regional planning and tackle the troublesome problem of cost allocation.
The situation calls into question whether Manchin cares all that much about bolstering domestic energy production.
A major difficulty with building new transmission lines is determining who pays for it. Utilities using the new transmission lines must divvy up the construction costs from revenues from ratepayers, and this inevitably leads to disputes. The proposed FERC rule establishes principles for a cost allocation method, preventing utilities from claiming that they will be unfairly burdened. Glick has said that cost allocation is critical to getting new transmission projects built.
The Manchin bill would go further in setting a method based on the benefits utilities would get from a new project. But as of now, FERC’s rule is the existing permitting reform happening within the government. And Glick, the man in Manchin’s crosshairs, is leading it.
The two have crossed swords before. Glick was the deciding vote for an update to pipeline reviews that “take into account a proposed project’s effect on climate change.” Manchin harshly criticized this vote at a hearing in March, calling it “a short-sighted attack on fossil fuel resources” that “serve[s] to further shut down the infrastructure that we desperately need as a country and further politicize energy development in our country.”
Perceived hostility to fossil fuel pipelines was probably enough to get Glick on the wrong side of Manchin. But Biden’s comments about shutting coal-fired power plants ahead of the midterms also infuriated Manchin. “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar,” Biden told an audience in Carlsbad, California. Though White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre attempted to walk back the remarks, Manchin called them “outrageous and divorced from reality.”
Whether Manchin is taking out his frustrations with Biden on Glick or has an animus toward anyone asking questions about fossil fuel pipelines, the net effect of his refusal to advance Glick is that permitting reform for electricity transmission will suffer. Supporters of permitting reform for the purposes of accelerating clean energy made common cause with Manchin earlier this year, saying that his effort was essential to the green transition. Manchin does not appear to agree, or he wouldn’t consign one of the lead agencies in that effort to gridlock.
Manchin has already drawn his first challenger, Rep. Alex Mooney (R-WV), for his Senate re-election in 2024.
