chevron-down Created with Sketch Beta.
November 01, 2016 Columns

Editor’s Column

By Casey Wren

As most readers know, the Clean Power Plan is in limbo with the enforcement of the plan having been stayed by the Supreme Court. In this issue, we begin the first of a two-part article about the status of the plan. In Part One, Robert Brubaker and Eric Gallon review the history of the Clean Power Plan and analyze the legal challenges to the plan. In Part Two, which will appear in our next issue, we will address the prospects for the Clean Power Plan in light of the election of Donald J. Trump and as the states and all three branches of the federal government re-examine the plan going forward. In our second article, Kerry McGrath and James Nortey II provide an update on FERC’s gradual effort to expand transmission infrastructure across the country by opening up transmission development to competition. Additionally, the authors compare FERC’s transmission policy to Texas’s policy and explain how a state with the nation’s only intrastate grid built over 2,000 miles of transmission lines in less than a decade.