On May 16, 2025, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) rejected a proposal that would have given new gas plants preferential treatment to connect to the electricity grid sooner than other energy projects after urging from Sierra Club and others. That proposal, called the Expedited Resource Adequacy Study (ERAS), was put forward by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the electric grid operator for 15 US states.
ERAS would have created a “fast-track” process to allow utilities to jump the queue and connect their own favored projects to the electricity grid ahead of other energy projects, especially clean energy projects, that have been steadily waiting to connect. There is currently more than 200 GW of solar, wind, and storage resources waiting in MISO’s grid connection queue—all of these projects would have seen their interconnection delayed by implementation of ERAS.
Sierra Club argued to FERC that MISO's ERAS proposal offered no principled oversight over what projects were selected for this expedited process, instead outsourcing that obligation to overburdened state regulators while providing no guidelines or standards for regulators to follow. This would have effectively handed control over access to the program over to utilities, many of whom are pushing for major gas expansion and all of whom would have been advantaged over clean energy developers in the region. The ERAS proposal also likely would have allowed ERAS projects to pay less than their fair share to connect to the grid, shifting those costs to other projects already in the standard queue and potentially onto ratepayers. MISO failed to demonstrate a need for this emergency process, particularly given the amount of clean energy already waiting to connect to the grid. ERAS projects wouldn’t even have been guaranteed to come online until as late as 2032, further undermining the idea that they might be needed for a near-term emergency.
FERC’s 2-1 decision focused on MISO’s failure to show any control over the projects that could enter the ERAS process or whether they were genuinely needed. The stated basis for the decision directly mirrored arguments developed and advanced by Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. FERC has invited MISO to come back with a new proposal that addresses the aforementioned issues; Sierra Club and our allies have submitted feedback as MISO tries to develop what is likely to be a new, replacement proposal at FERC later this month.
Sierra Club is represented by Environmental Law Program Senior Attorney Greg Wannier.