Back to Basics

As January turns to February, there is still time for one last New Year’s Resolution, so let’s start by offering a resolution to FERC Chairman Phillips: Emphasize the need for FERC to get back to basics.

Activists and enthusiasts – particularly those hailing from Capitol Hill – cannot resist the prospect of turning administrative agencies into vehicles for realizing their policy ends. This is a widespread lament. When Congress is paralyzed, or better yet, prefers to abdicate its policymaking prerogatives to agencies, the agencies become the place where the policymaking action happens.

Turn to the tenure of FERC Chairman Glick, whose ambitions to transform, cajole and force the utility industry toward his preferred policy visions had few constraints. You could blame his background coming from Capitol Hill, where such unconstrained policymaking is supposed to happen; or you could blame an energy policy climate that is frenetic in its urgency and righteousness.

Enter Chairman Phillips, who comes from the DC Public Service Commission. State (and District) utility regulators tend to come from institutional backgrounds that are more modest and focused on the actual utility customer. By focusing on the actual customer, you get a regulatory outlook that focuses on the basics: affordability, reliable service, balancing the interests of providers and customers.

FERC has a tradition of focusing on such goals. Indeed, until the activists started performatively disrupting FERC meetings, FERC had a bi-partisan consensus as a law-abiding agency that stuck to keeping energy plentiful, reliable and affordable. Let’s get back to basic at FERC.