Volts podcast: Rep. Sean Casten on Hot FERC Summer

In this episode, Rep. Sean Casten (D-Il.), the House Democrats’ resident clean-energy expert, discusses the importance of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the influence it has over US decarbonization, and the urgent need for Biden to appoint a new commissioner. We also get into our favorite FERC orders!

Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Rep. Sean Casten, July 28, 2021

(PDF version)

David Roberts:

Greetings. Welcome to the Volts Podcast. I am your host, David Roberts.

As Volts subscribers are well aware, the fastest way to decarbonize the US economy is through clean electrification — decarbonizing the electricity sector and shifting energy use in other sectors like transportation and buildings over to electricity.

How can the federal government help that process along? Most control over power utilities and markets lies at the state level. There's only one federal agency with real jurisdiction over electricity: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC.

FERC is not an agency people many people follow, or even know about — in fact, in the Volts household, it has become a kind of jokey shorthand for "the boring stuff dad writes about."

But it could play a key role in implementing Biden's climate agenda. And it has come to a crucial crossroads.

FERC has five commissioners. Currently, three are Republicans, but one of them, Neil Chatterjee, came to the end of his term on June 30. He has agreed to stay on temporarily because Biden, somewhat inexplicably, has yet to formally nominate anyone to replace him. Until he does, and the Senate confirms, the commission will not have a Democratic majority and won’t be able to get anything big done.

That’s unfortunate, because FERC has lots of big decisions to make — about transmission, electricity rates, and markets — with potentially transformative consequences. But the agency moves slowly, with rulemakings taking months or years, and it only has three and a half years to get everything done. Biden needs to get someone in that seat.

Enter Rep. Sean Casten. The Democrat from Illinois' 6th District, which includes wide swaths of the western suburbs of Chicago, is trying to draw attention to FERC and the importance of a bold and climate-minded new commissioner. He’s leading a communications campaign called "Hot FERC Summer," a twist on Megan Thee Stallion's "Hot Girl Summer." (Hey, nobody said getting eyes on FERC was easy.)

Casten, a member of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, recently delivered a floor speech filled with Stallion-related puns of varying cheesiness, calling on Biden and Dems to nominate and approve a new commissioner quickly. He has also co-authored bills on transmission siting and ratemaking that clarify and reinforce FERC's obligation to take climate change into account in its decisions.

I have known Sean since the 2010s, when he was the CEO of a waste heat recovery company called Recycled Energy Development. His long experience in the clean energy industry informed some sharp analysis, and he occasionally wrote guest posts for my blog at Grist, the environmental news site I worked for at the time.

As you can imagine, it was a delight to see him win a seat in Congress in 2018, bringing his deep energy expertise to a body that has often lacked it. I was excited to geek out with him about FERC and the state of congressional energy politics.

Rep. Sean Casten, welcome to Volts!

Rep. Sean Casten:

So happy to be here, David.

David Roberts:

Sean, I knew you back when you reached the pinnacle of your career: I'm talking, of course, about when you were writing guest blog posts for me at Grist.

Rep. Sean Casten:

Really, it's been downhill for both of us since we left Grist.

David Roberts:

Suffice to say, you know more about energy than the average bear; probably considerably more, I would say, than the average congressperson. So before we get to FERC: When you got to Congress, would you say that the average clean-energy literacy of your colleagues in Congress was higher or lower than you expected going in?

Rep. Sean Casten:

Oh, that's the kind of question that could get me in trouble for throwing people under the bus, but let me maybe offer one of the best pieces of wisdom I got on getting sworn in. Jamie Raskin, who of course everybody knows now because of his work on impeachment, is just a wonderfully kind and decent person. And he said to me, when I was just sworn in and trying to figure out the ropes of this place, he said, “This is a job that makes you very broad, but it's very hard to have the time to get deep. And if you want to know how to get things done, ask people why they first ran, because that's a really good shorthand way to find out where people are deep. If you really want to do something on healthcare policy or criminal justice, it'll help to know who those are.”

So I've tried to follow that policy. I've asked around, and I will tell you that I have not met a lot of people who said, “I ran because I care about energy policy” — which is not a criticism, because they did run for other reasons, and they have depth in other areas. But historically, energy policy is not the kind of thing that pollsters say, “the voters demand somebody who really appreciates the nuances of obligation-to-serve and ratemaking proceedings,” right?

So yes, it's lonely. It's just not a way that people typically get into Congress.

David Roberts:

Well, all of the sudden, these issues are on the front burner, and everybody in Congress is expected to know a bunch of stuff about them. Have you found that people are open to being educated? Is there a crash education process happening?

Rep. Sean Casten:

There is and there isn’t. It's interesting, I find that energy policy is a lot like foreign policy in the sense that most voters don't care, but we [Congressfolk] make decisions that are really impactful. So it becomes an area where members are very deferential to staff.

I am as well; I don't claim to be an expert on, you know, the situation going on in Afghanistan right now. But I trust that there are staff on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and their job is to understand that.

So yes, members are receptive. But what's hard on issues like energy policy is that the job of a congressional staff person is to figure out how to get done what is politically possible; the job of a staff person is not to move the Overton window. It’s hard to get members who are confident enough in their own skills to really try to push the envelope on energy policy.

David Roberts:

Let's talk about FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Whenever I tell people I'm writing about FERC, the eye glaze is almost instant. So maybe just tell us, why should ordinary people care about FERC?