So, joining us tonight will be Senator Alan Armstrong. He came to the Senate. Yes. And we'll call him up in just a second.
He came to the Senate after four decades of building American energy infrastructure at Williams, starting as an entry-level engineer and finishing as chief executive. By the end of his run, the infrastructure he helped build was moving roughly one-third of the natural gas flowing across America every day. I know living in New Hampshire, we would like to have more of that up in our state, especially during our cold winters. So, when he says that building has gotten too hard, he's speaking from real firsthand experience.
And here's what I find remarkable. He was appointed to the Senate in March, and he's going to serve through the end of the year. But he brings a job creators mentality to the work, something that I think Washington desperately needs to hear. And we've heard from governors talking about how important it is to get to permitting reform, to bring the energy into their states, into their economies. And I think it's going to be awesome to hear from a job creator who's run a business and who knows firsthand what it's like to build that infrastructure.
As he put it last month, our national energy infrastructure is like a bridge. No one really cares about it until it falls down, and the cracks are starting to show right now. Leading the conversation with the senator is Robin Milikin, director of research programs and strategic partnerships at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy. She spent years at Breakthrough Energy building federal policy strategy, and before that worked at Gates Ventures, where she served as a primary contributor to Bill Gates's 2021 book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster." Her recent work makes the case that rising electricity prices aren't a data center story so much as a structural one, tracing back to interconnection queues, permitting, and misaligned incentives.
It's a long way to say that these two are certainly going to have a lot to talk about tonight. So, please join me in welcoming Senator Alan Armstrong and Robin Milikin.
Wow, it is wonderful to be here and to see so many good friends here in the room. As we should, I wanted to thank the sponsors of National Clean Energy Week. This is one of the most phenomenal events of the year to discuss all of the pertinent topics on the energy policy agenda, and I'm very pleased to be joined here by Senator Alan Armstrong to talk about how we make permitting reform cool again. So, we'll make it an engaging conversation. And with that, Senator Armstrong, I wanted to ask you: you had an illustrious career in business. What drew you to public service, and what made you convinced that permitting reform was the issue that you wanted to spend your precious time in the Senate on?
Well, thank you, and man, what a beautiful place, and really appreciate the opportunity to get to speak to you tonight. You know, I would say first of all, the governor called me and I said, "I mean, like, we can find somebody much better for this." And so, and I genuinely meant that, but he told me how serious he was about getting permitting reform done. And so, I made a few calls. I called my good friend Mary Landrieu and said, "Do you really think..." Yes. Yeah. And said, "Do you really think that we could actually get something done?" And she was like, "Well, you know, it's better than a 10% chance." So I saw that as enough to want to engage on it.
But really, honestly, what kind of compelled me on it was I've been so frustrated. You know, I've been in the engineering construction business with Williams and spent a lot of my career working on building out critical infrastructure, and I realized how incredibly difficult it has gotten to build anything in our country. And I look at my, you know, three grandkids, and it's a really good compass for me. And I certainly didn't want to be sitting around in retirement playing golf, complaining about what's not getting done, if I was given the opportunity to go try to get something done. And it really wasn't much more complicated than that, frankly. And so that's why I'm here. I've been very clear with what the mission is.
You know, as I tell my team, I'm never going to apologize for prioritizing and making permitting reform our very top priority. And we're not going to let anything get in the front of that. And sometimes you have to, you really do have to, if you really want to get something done, you have to be willing to say no to other things. And that's, you know, I'm just very thankful. I've just had an awesome staff. They're all very committed to it. And it's been a lot of fun, frankly, to work on it, and we are making progress. I will tell you one of the things that I think has gone extremely well, and this body here is a good example of that, is that we've tried really hard to listen to all sectors of industry.
And I think one of the failures that we've had in the past on getting something done is it's been good for this sector and bad for this sector. And we really came at it from a perspective of we're going to make it good for all linear infrastructure, and we very much have held to that. And we are making sure that we are bringing equal balance to the issue. And it's so important that the cross-sectors of industry stay together on this voice.
I tell people all the time, I used to complain about the lack of bipartisanship effort that goes on in the Congress and all the factions that go on there, and I said, "Well, you know, if industry can't learn to speak with one voice, you shouldn't expect Congress to speak with one voice." And so I am so thankful and so proud of the way industry has come together to speak with one voice, and it is really powerful. Believe me, it is what is giving people in Congress hope that we're actually going to get something done at this point. So, thank all of you for really pushing to get something comprehensive done and meaningful done.
Well, I know I speak for everyone in the room that we're very grateful that you have such a laser-like focus on this very important issue. I do want to unpack it a bit more. What's on the table? What are the current sort of negotiation dynamics? But before we go there, I did want to ask, because we were chatting about this a bit in the green room, how do you contrast your time at Williams, the requirements of the job, with the requirements of a senator? Like, how is it similar? How is it different?
Yeah, you know, I had been a CEO for almost 15 years at Williams, and I was there for 40 years. And so things had gotten, even though I didn't realize it, you know, the pitches had gotten a little slower, and it was a little bit of Groundhog Day. If you think about, you know, your career being in—it's kind of weird—but you think about if you're in the same job for 15 years, there's not very many people in executive roles that you're actually in the same job for that long. And so while I hated to admit it to myself, I'd gotten a little bit stale, and the challenges weren't as daunting, you know, as I think we all want. And so this has been an incredible opportunity to learn a new set of skill sets, a new group of people and relationships, and tackle a very, very difficult problem. And it's really kind of kept me charged up.
But I'd say, you know, some of the key differences are, well, one, when you're CEO, you just get to say what's going to happen and it happens. And so, you know, that's probably the biggest. Being a very freshman senator and being somebody that has a very certain and fixed tenure doesn't leave you with a lot of power in the room with senators. And I, you know, I didn't go in blind to that issue. But I would say people have been remarkably respectful and appreciative. I mean, there's certainly, you know, little turf battles that flare up here and there, but for the most part, people have been very encouraging.
You know, we have on the bill that we put out that was kind of laying out here's what really needs to change. We've had 20 co-sponsors on that bill. And so people have been, you know, really, I think, remarkably supportive. But it is very different being in a position of kind of the ultimate power within a corporation and then coming in and being kind of the junior guy. Has been a big shift for me.
Well, I'm sure you brought some of your business savvy to those negotiations. That's a great segue to talking about what's actually on the table. I'm sure everyone here is living and breathing permitting reform. We're all on our phones, you know, checking for updates. But just to set a baseline, can you give us a sense of what the big topics are that you think are, you know, under negotiation, and which of those issues appear in your energy—I'm sorry, American Energy and Minerals Infrastructure Act?
Sure. Well, I would say that there's really kind of, I think, four kind of critical elements that are out there. I think first and foremost is judicial reform under NEPA. And, you know, hate to get super technical and boring for people on that, but today the litigation environment that exists is not constructive for everybody. I always tell people, you think, you know, that if you go beat a big bad pipeline company or you stop a transmission line or you stop a mine, that you've beat up on that big bad corporation. In reality, you've just added cost to the American consumer.
And if we really reduced the litigation risk in projects and made sure that somebody has a legitimate issue that needs to be taken to court—nobody's trying to stop that—but they are trying to say you need to bring the issue up when it's time within the EIS or the EA during the environmental review. That's when you need to bring the issue up. And if it's not addressed appropriately, then you have standing to go and file suit. But after the fact, when you didn't raise those issues, is really what's problematic. And so that's one issue.
Along second to that is certainty, and meaning that we shouldn't be in a position where if you went and got a lawful permit and you as a corporation did your job to get the lawful certificate and permit, there shouldn't be a court or an executive branch that has the ability of pulling that permit when you did nothing wrong. You complied. Now, if you did something wrong or you didn't comply with the terms of the permit and certificate as a company, then great, you should—you know—the court should have the authority. But when you complied with what the agency required, the suit shouldn't impact you.
You spent a billion dollars. You did everything you were required to, and you get told while you're up during construction or up in operation that your certificate's been pulled. That is third-world-country kind of operation, and it's not where we should be with either the judicial branch or the executive branch. So certainty and getting that pinned down is very important.
Other issues, and I'll call this Clean Water Act, but there's a few other issues that kind of go along with this where we have a lack of standards, and the state has the ability to just arbitrarily come up with new standards on the fly and come up with a reason, and they're not required to make it part of the EIS or the EA process. So after you've spent all this time and all this effort with all the constituents finding the very best route that everybody agrees on, you shouldn't be able to have an agency, whether it's the Historical Preservation Act or whether it's a state agency, they shouldn't be able to come in after that process and say, "No, we want you to—you should have put it over here."
And so that issue of having standards and having those processes concurrent—again, not trying to take any rights away that are legitimate rights to raise those concerns, but they need to be raised within the same process and not in a sequential fashion. And then, so that's—and then finally, I think making sure that we find a way to make sure that we can site transmission with the Federal Power Act, that we can site transmission more effectively.
I will tell you that that is probably the issue that there's the most difference between what the Senate might pass and what the House might pass. And I think that's a really on-the-bubble issue as we speak about where permitting reform really goes. And just to unpack that a little further, we need to be able to make sure that people can go and get interstate long-haul transmission built, one, but we also have to respect the fact that states that have their utilities, we can't shift the rate-making authority and impose added cost unnecessarily against the ratepayers.
And it's that issue of, yes, we need the interstate transmission built, but we have to respect the rights of the utility commissions in the rate-making process and particularly the RTOs and the ISOs in that process. That's really where the challenge is kind of hung up right now, and it's where the needle is going to have to be threaded very finely to be able to go from where we are today in the Senate to get that back through the House and maintain support for it. So, those are kind of the four key issues.
Well, I have to say I'm not surprised that of everything, transmission is one of the big sticking points. It's needed for everything. I mean, we need to build much more, especially high-voltage direct current transmission, and the current, you know, Byzantine process where you have to have, you know, DOE do a needs assessment and then designate corridors and then FERC can intervene if a state either fails to act or denies a permit and a developer has proposed a project in a corridor—it's totally crazy. So we need to have some kind of solution there. So we applaud your dogged leadership to try and get something good on the table there.
Just on the topic of what I think is a key theme in everything that you said, is around certainty, right? Industry—you know this well from your time at Williams—industry and capital allocation thrives on certainty. Do you think that if there is a permitting deal that gets done, that we are going to see a big acceleration in more generation, transmission, etc.? And specifically, if so, what types of projects do you think will most benefit from the reforms?
Yeah, you know, first of all, as much as people want to hear this that it's immediately going to solve all these problems, you know, I would tell you it's going to take—I mean, people have been burned over and over and over at this point. And so the risk premium on capital has crept up enormously. But to the degree that people really think that litigation risk has been dramatically reduced and that you can go through one process, not multiple sequential processes, to get a permit, I definitely think that you are going to see a lot of capital at lower cost come back into the market.
And so, you know, people want to say, well, does this mean you can build a pipeline in two years instead of eight years? It's like, well, if it just means that you can get a pipeline built with some certainty, that is a huge positive from where we are today. And does it mean that a state—I mean, you think about some of the transmission projects that have been stopped. They've been stopped by states saying, "Well, what is in this for me?" And therefore, you definitely need interstate commerce law to be able to get transmission built. You need federal eminent domain rights. And so there does have to be some strength that comes with that. But that would be pretty powerful in terms of getting things built.
You know, I saw there's a study that McKinsey did that says there's one and a half trillion dollars right now of projects between pipelines, transmission lines, power plants that are held up right now waiting on permitting. That's a big number. And what I like to communicate with people is let the floodgates open. You talk about lowering prices. If you overbuild pipeline capacity—when I started in the space, the competition was always somebody building over the top of you, and you always had to be pricing your services in a way that it prohibited somebody building.
Today, if you're pricing pipeline capacity and you're the incumbent and there's an expansion, it is—I mean, it is very monopolistic in terms of what that accomplishes. And it's not because the company did something wrong. It's because of our regulatory practices that allow for that. But the harm in that—I mean, this really, really frustrates me—that we have NGOs out there that think that they're beating up on the big bad company, and what they're really beating up on is the poor consumer. And when we constrain resource by constraining infrastructure, the harm is the consumer and our businesses here in the US.
And so, man, would it be a game-changer if we got back to where people had head-to-head competition in building infrastructure in terms of lowering costs? It would be a complete game-changer for our country.
