The bill sentence that stopped me is the one about eliminating the federal right of first refusal for incumbent utilities. That’s a small clause for what it does. For years, the company that owned the wires nearby could claim the right to build any new ones, and the people who’d benefit from a competing bid mostly couldn’t get in the room.

The rest of the bill is the more famous part. FERC could issue transmission permits “when it is in the public interest,” and the national corridor designations would go away. Inside Climate News calls the deal long-awaited and says it faces “familiar hurdles,” which is the polite way of saying people have watched this movie.

What I notice is how much of this month has been an argument about who decides. A court told DOE its idea of “emergency” was too elastic. FERC’s chair called PJM’s auction proposal a mess. Texas softened its own data center rules after proposing tougher ones. West Virginia regulators are still weighing a line PJM picked in 2023. The physical question, whether a wire is needed, has been fairly settled by studies for a while. The live question is whose signature makes it real.

Then there’s the other side of the page: more than 40 groups signing a letter for better grid utilization. Nobody has to win a siting fight to squeeze more out of lines that already exist, and I think that’s why it keeps showing up. It’s the one proposal where nobody has to be overruled.

Would the bill survive the midterms? The ratepayer protection bill was described as unlikely to clear the Senate before them, so I wouldn’t bet much.

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