Regulatory Affairs news highlights: May 2026

 

Recent regulatory headlines we’re tracking include:

 

FERC shares it will take action on large loads ANOPR by June

FERC issued a statement that it plans to take action by June 2026 on the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANOPR) proceeding initiated by the Department of Energy Secretary on reforms to enable the timely, orderly, and non-discriminatory interconnection of large loads (such as data centers) to the transmission system. FERC shared that in working on this matter, FERC staff has reviewed over 3,500 pages of public comments in the docket, engaged with stakeholders, and coordinated efforts across federal agencies.

 

House Energy Committee holds hearing on AI demand and ratepayer impacts

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy & Commerce held a hearing on “AI and the Grid: Meeting Growing Power Demand While Protecting Ratepayers” on April 29. The hearing’s witnesses were Nelson Peeler, Senior VP of Grid Strategy, Planning and Integration at Duke Energy; Nick Myers, Chairman of the Arizona Corporation Commission; Tom Falcone, President of the Large Public Power Council; and Whitney Muse, President of Muse Energy.

In his testimony, Mr. Peeler emphasized the importance of interconnection queue reforms and predictable and efficient national environmental permitting processes. Mr. Myers discussed Arizona’s guiding principle that “growth pays for growth,” meaning that when large loads come onto the system, they need to fund the required supporting infrastructure rather than ratepayers.

In his remarks, Mr. Falcone agreed with Mr. Myers that existing customers should not subsidize large or speculative load requests. He also noted that federal policy should promote credible load forecasts and practical customer commitments. Ms. Muse was supportive of most of the proposed draft bills but raised concerns about H.R. 6336, the draft “Fair Allocation of Interstate Rates Act,” stating that it could block needed regional and interregional transmission deployment due to cost allocation concerns.

The full recording of the hearing is available here.

 

U.S. and international security agencies issue guide on managing agentic AI risks

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Australian Cyber Security Centre, and other international partners issued a new guide titled “Careful Adoption of Agentic AI Services” on May 1.

The guide defines agentic AI as being “composed of one or more agents that fundamentally rely on an AI model, such as an LLM [Large Language Model], to interpret and reason about the state of the world, make decisions and take actions.”

The guide discusses risks and vulnerabilities associated with agentic AI. It also provides guidance on how to safely design, develop, deploy, and operate agentic AI systems and conduct risk assessments and mitigation activities. Key recommendations include:

1) employing the principle of least privilege,

2) building security into the system architecture,

3) human oversight mechanisms and strong transparency practices,

4) inputting management controls, and

5) red-teaming to assess the security and resilience of AI agents.