Regulatory Affairs news highlights: February 2026

 

Recent regulatory headlines we’re tracking include:

 

House subcommittee hearing features testimonies from FERC Commissioners

The U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy held a hearing titled “Oversight of FERC: Advancing Affordable and Reliable Energy for All Americans” on Feb. 3. All five FERC commissioners provided testimony and answered questions from the Subcommittee.

The links to the commissioners’ testimony are as follows:

• Chairman Laura V. Swett
• Commissioner David Rosner
• Commissioner Lindsay S. See
• Commissioner Judy W. Chang
• Commissioner David LaCerte

Common themes from the testimonies include the importance of protecting reliability and affordability for customers in the face of large and rapid increases in electric demand. Other areas discussed include efforts to accelerate generation and other infrastructure, and the importance of regulatory certainty to encourage growth. Several of the commissioners noted the improved winterization efforts across the industry, including the new winterization NERC Reliability Standards.

Subcommittee member questions included how FERC is working to speed the interconnection of new generation, and about the rising costs of electricity and FERC’s ability to reduce rates by trimming utility profit margins. A full recording of the hearing is available here.

The same week, the Subcommittee on Energy held a markup session for five electric physical and cyber security-related bills, and forwarded them to the full U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee for consideration. The five bills are:

• H.R. 7258, Energy Emergency Leadership Act
  • Directs the DOE to assign an Assistant Secretary leadership over energy emergency and security functions, including infrastructure, resilience, emerging threats, and cyber security; and technical support for states, tribes, and the energy sector.
• H.R. 7266, Rural and Municipal Utility Cybersecurity Act
  • Maintains and strengthens an existing grant and technical assistance program to help rural electric cooperatives and municipal utilities deploy advanced cyber security technologies and increase their participation in cyber security threat information sharing programs.
• H.R. 7257, Securing Community Upgrades for a Resilient Grid (SECURE Grid) Act
  • Requires states to include physical security, cyber security, and resilience of local electric distribution systems in their State Energy Security Plans to better identify vulnerabilities and strengthen reliability.
• H.R. 7272, Pipeline Cybersecurity Preparedness Act
  • Requires the DOE to develop a program that enhances federal/state/industry coordination, technical tools, workforce development, preparedness for cyber and physical threats, and response and recovery efforts for natural gas pipelines and LNG facilities, without creating new regulatory authority.
• H.R. 7305, Energy Threat Analysis Center Act of 2026
  • Reauthorizes and expands the DOE’s Energy Sector Operational Support for Cyberresilience Program and the Energy Threat Analysis Center to improve collaboration, threat analysis, and resilience across the U.S. energy sector.

 

House subcommittee hearing focuses on energy infrastructure, cyber and physical security

The U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy held a hearing titled “Protecting America’s Energy Infrastructure in Today’s Cyber and Physical Threat Landscape” on Jan. 13. The witnesses at the hearing were:

• Alex Fitzsimmons, Acting Undersecretary of Energy and Director of the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, DOE;
• Scott Aaronson, Senior Vice President, Energy Security and Industry Operations, Edison Electric Institute;
• Adrienne Lotto, Senior Vice President of Grid Security, Technical and Operations Services, American Public Power Association;
• Nathaniel J. Melby, Ph.D., Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Dairyland Power, on behalf of National Rural Electric Cooperative Association; and
• Rebecca O’Neil, Research Principal, Infrastructure, Energy and Environment Directorate, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

During Panel 1, Mr. Fitzsimmons discussed and encouraged the passage of numerous energy bills under consideration, including the Energy Threat Analysis Center (ETAC) Act of 2026, the Energy Emergency Leadership Act, the Rural and Municipal Utility Cybersecurity Act, the Securing Community Upgrades for a Resilient Grid Act (SECURE Grid Act), and the Pipeline and Cybersecurity Preparedness Act.

During Panel 2, Mr. Aaronson discussed the importance of public-private information sharing and urged Congress to reauthorize the Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Act of 2015. Ms. Lotto expressed her support of the reauthorization of the Rural and Municipal Utility Cybersecurity Act, characterizing it as a “once in a generation opportunity to improve the cybersecurity of under resourced, not-for-profit utilities.”

Dr. Melby also focused his testimony on support for the Rural and Municipal Utility Cybersecurity Act, citing the unique financial challenges related to securing the grid in rural areas. Ms. O’Neil provided information on state energy security plans (discussed in the SECURE Grid Act) and how states and territories benefit from strong plans. The hearing webcast recording is available here.

 

FBI Launches Operation Winter SHIELD focusing on security threats

The FBI launched an initiative to help critical infrastructure operators and other entities strengthen the cyber security of their operational technology and information technology assets. The initiative is named Operation Winter SHIELD (Securing Homeland Infrastructure by Enhancing Layered Defense) and is meant to serve as a cyber counterpart to the winter preparations that infrastructure owners implement each year.

A key goal of the program is to position critical infrastructure operators as allies in detecting, confronting, and dismantling cyber threats. The Winter SHIELD campaign is built around 10 recommended actions developed by the FBI with input from domestic and international partners, based on adversary behavior and defensive gaps seen in recent cyber events.