Neil Chatterjee explains why he wants engineers, lawyers, and economists to drive energy policy.
At age 10, Neil Chatterjee found common ground with his immigrant father through politics. Watching then-Vice President George H. W. Bush spar with Michael Dukakis during a presidential debate on TV, Neil and his dad connected in a way they hadn’t before.
Years later, after serving as Senator Mitch McConnell’s energy advisor and appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, he found that he needed to shed his partisan views — and his reputation as McConnell’s coal guy — to become a convener. Doing so helped him enact policies to make a more resilient electric grid with more renewable and distributed energy resources.
This week on With Great Power, Neil Chatterjee explains why he thinks energy policy has gotten so politicized in the U.S. and what could change that trajectory. He and Brad delve into some of the weedy issues FERC will be addressing in 2026 and some “wonky solutions" to load growth and other grid challenges. Neil also talks about his current role as chief government affairs officer at Palmetto, a provider of residential renewable energy products.
Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.
Brad Langley: As a kid in Buffalo, New York, Neil Chatterjee didn't have a lot in common with his dad.
Neil Chatterjee: He wasn't familiar with Transformers or GI Joe or He-Man or the Buffalo Bills.
Brad Langley: Both of Neil's parents grew up in India. They had emigrated to the US to pursue careers in academia.
Neil Chatterjee: We didn't really have the same interests. There wasn't a lot of commonality.
Brad Langley: But then came the 1988 presidential election.
Neil Chatterjee: I still have vivid memories of being about 10 years old, watching then Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush debate Michael Dukakis.
Brad Langley: As the candidates sparred over defense spending and the economy, Neil and his dad were riveted. They'd found a common connection.
Neil Chatterjee: My dad took me more seriously as a 10-year-old because I was into the thing that he was into. That fostered my love of politics and public policy.
Brad Langley: Not long after that, the Chatterjee family moved to Lexington, Kentucky. Neil gravitated towards conservative politics. For an assignment in high school, he had to write a report about an influential Kentuckian.
Neil Chatterjee: I chose a relatively unknown junior senator from Louisville named Addison Mitchell McConnell.
Brad Langley: Yep. That Mitch McConnell. From high school through law school, Neil followed McConnell's rise. Soon after graduating, Neil moved to Washington DC for an internship on the House Ways and Means Committee. In 2004, he landed an energy advisory role for US Representative Deborah Pryce. Then in 2009, he got a call from Senator McConnell, who was by then the Republican Senate minority leader.
Neil Chatterjee: He was very good about keeping tabs on Kentuckians in Washington, DC.
Brad Langley: Neil served as McConnell's policy advisor for nearly eight years. A lot of people actually dubbed him McConnell's coal guy because of the cultural and economic importance of coal in Kentucky. Then in 2017, President Trump tapped Neil for a seat on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or FERC. Soon after, Democratic Senators Whitehouse and Markey, they put a hold on his nomination.
Neil Chatterjee: They said, "Hey, look, the commission has commenced these procedures to look at opening up competitive wholesale power markets to energy storage and aggregated distributed energy resources. Just promise us you won't be some political hack, that you'll actually take a look at this stuff."
Brad Langley: So Neil promised, but he admits that transitioning from a partisan to an independent regulator wasn't easy.
Neil Chatterjee: Particularly in my rhetoric and the way I carried myself and dealt with the media, I did kind of convey the sense that I was going to put my thumb on the scale for coal in a political way. And it took me getting knocked onto the canvas a couple times to realize I'm not doing the job right, that I have to be a truly independent-minded regulator.
Brad Langley: Then in 2020, as FERC chair, Neil championed FERC Order 2222, which accomplished what Senators Markey and Whitehouse had been pushing for years. It required grid operators to allow aggregated DERs to participate in wholesale electricity markets. After leaving FERC in 2021, Neil joined the law firm Hogan Lovells, where his first client was a company called Palmetto, a residential clean energy provider.
Neil Chatterjee: In mid-2024, the CEO was very prescient and he saw the likelihood that Trump would get elected and that there might be a potential threat to clean energy.
Brad Langley: So that CEO, Chris Kemper, asked Neil to come in-house.
Neil Chatterjee: I thought long and hard about it. I was happy at the law firm, but I thought I'm 48 years old. If I'm ever going to go in-house at a company, I want it to be a place where I believe in the leadership, I believe in the mission, the objectives and the culture of the company.
Brad Langley: He joined Palmetto as chief government affairs officer in early 2025. It hasn't been easy, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has ensured it's also anything but boring.
Neil Chatterjee: Ultimately, despite the fact that the OBBBA was a nuclear bomb on the clean energy sector, it was not good for clean energy, it was not good for the planet. Palmetto and companies like us, we were the cockroaches that survived.
Brad Langley: This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid today. I'm Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change, they don't innovate fast enough. And while it might not seem like the most cutting edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable, and customer-centric.
Today, my guest is Neil Chatterjee, chief government affairs officer at Palmetto. We talk about why he thinks energy policy has gotten so politicized in the US and why America's race to build AI could actually change that trajectory. We also get into some of the weedy but important issues that FERC will be addressing in 2026. But first, I wanted to learn more about his role at Palmetto.
Neil Chatterjee: I am sort of the interface between the company and investors and federal policy. And there are direct implications to the business from changes in federal policy. And we saw it most vividly, quite frankly, this past summer.
Brad Langley: That's because an early House version of the One Big Beautiful Bill would have eliminated tax credits for leased residential solar panels, which is a core part of Palmetto's business.
Neil Chatterjee: I was able to work with some of my peers throughout the industry to convince some conservative lawmakers that it was not in their interest to include this kind of hostile language. And we were able to get it out of the bill. And now I feel that Palmetto is on a trajectory to move away from reliance upon government policy and incentives and really capture the opportunity that the growth in the energy economy will provide. We know that we have a ramp that we have to get off of subsidies by the end of this ramp we were given by Congress in the OBBBA. In order to meet this challenge, we need every available electron. The reality is that while we may keep existing coal plants around a little bit, there's not going to be a huge surge in building new coal. While I'm a big supporter of and believer in and hopeful for a nuclear future, I still remain skeptical that we're going to get advanced nuclear online anytime soon.
Gas is an incredible fuel, but gas prices are rising and we're probably looking at 2029 at the earliest because of supply chain issues and the like before we can get new gas online. The quickest resource that we can deploy to meet this coming surge in demand is solar plus storage with gas peakers to balance the grid. There is an enormous opportunity for companies like Palmetto in the coming years — not because of government supports, but because we're going to look really attractive economically. Consumers who are going to be confronted with increasing electricity bills are suddenly going to look to residential rooftop solar, and particularly with a lease product that makes it affordable and say, "That's really, really compelling to me." Part of the way that we were able to survive the OBBBA threats to the business model was we convinced conservative lawmakers that business models like Palmetto's were actually pretty populist and pretty favorable to conservatives.
Why be beholden to your monopoly utility when you could take your energy destiny in your own hands and do it in an affordable way with a lease product through a company like Palmetto? So I just think the trajectory of circumstances, policy, market, consumer focus, it all lines up very, very well.
Brad Langley: You mentioned it's been a very tumultuous year for energy policy. I think nuclear bomb was the terminology you used. How has that political landscape changed the way that companies like Palmetto need to approach policy?
Neil Chatterjee: When I first came to Washington as a young aide in the early 2000s, the chairman and the ranking member, the top two members, one Republican, one Democrat of the Senate Energy Committee, which is the principal committee with jurisdiction over energy policy in the US Senate, they were both from New Mexico, Domenici and Bingaman. And in those early years of the George W. Bush administration, the Senate majority actually flipped and flopped back a few times, and yet the agenda of the Senate Energy Committee never changed because Domenici and Bingaman weren't doing what was in the best interest of the Democrat Party or the Republican Party. They were doing what was in the best interest of New Mexico, the state they both happened to represent. And so there was a time when energy policy wasn't political. It was geographic. You voted what was under your feet or over your head.
And you had Republicans in the Northeast who had much more in common with Democrats in the West than they did with Republicans in the Southeast or Appalachia and vice versa. And that all started to change, I think, during the Obama era as there was a greater emphasis on climate and decarbonization. There was a period where climate change policy wasn't political. John McCain was the Republican nominee for president in 2008. He was the primary author of a cap and trade bill to curb carbon emissions. Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for president in 2012 who was openly calling for a price on carbon. Climate change became politicized in the 2010s, and I think that was a huge mistake. And we're now sort of stuck in this antiquated notion that if you're for fossil fuels, you're of the political right, and if you're for clean energy and climate solutions, you're of the political left.
And this is really frustrating to me. We genuinely need to reevaluate where we are. We need to make energy policy boring again. And when you take the politicians and the celebrities and the CEOs out of it, and you allow the engineers and the lawyers and the economists to construct the path forward, you get better outcomes without any of the ancillary drama.
Brad Langley: What would a less politicized approach to energy look like and how would it lead to better outcomes?
Neil Chatterjee: I think AI is going to be the thing that snaps us out of our partisan political corners because AI is intriguing. It's not clear cut politically which way AI breaks. If you believe that we need to win the AI race against the Chinese Communist Party for national security purposes, you've got to understand that energy is the key factor or the limiting factor to winning that AI race. So how do we make sure we provide that energy without seeing a spike in electricity bills and without compromising reliability and resource adequacy? I think AI is the thing that's going to snap us out of it and we'll get engineering solutions. We'll figure out how do we provide enough power to these data centers to win the AI race? How do these data centers become more energy efficient so they're not using so much water, so they're not taking up so much space, so they're not creating so much noise, so they're not using so much power?
How do we deploy flexible resources like demand response and energy efficiency to enable these data centers to curtail, to actually bring down carbon emissions? How do we use AI for things like combining satellite imagery and AI to help utilities with wildfire risk mitigation or finding better ways to build out transmission or better navigate the interconnection queue? I just think there's a bunch of wonky technical solutions available to us that rise above politics. And I think that circumstances are going to push us in that direction that will enable us if properly managed to get out of the way, get politicians out of the way and actually land this thing.
Brad Langley: So in the fall, Energy Secretary Wright directed FERC to initiate a rulemaking process to standardize the interconnection of large loads like data centers to the transmission grid. Can you walk us through that request and its implications?
Neil Chatterjee: Yeah. Look, this was a huge deal. FERC has been wrestling with this for a couple of years now. It started with a case called Talen-AWS. I don't want to bore your listeners to tears with getting into the details of a FERC case, but essentially what Talen, Amazon and Susquehanna Electric, PPL tried to do was broker an agreement where Amazon would build a data center in the footprint of an existing nuclear plant and plug it right in. And it seemed on the surface like a win-win-win. We're getting a leg up in the AI race, we're getting carbon-free nuclear power, we're getting an extended lifeline to this nuclear plant that has been struggling economically for the better part of the last decade. We're taking it behind the meter. Everybody wins. Well, there were a lot of really complex questions that came out of that. One, around resource adequacy.
If Talen-AWS had served as a blueprint for other data centers, hyperscalers and generators to do deals, and suddenly you had a run of these deals using that blueprint, you might have a resource adequacy challenge where on the hottest day of summer or the coldest day of winter, if power had to go to a 24/7 data center to support AI or to a residential consumer who needs heat or who needs air conditioning, it's going to that data center and that's when the pitchforks come out and that would've been a problem. There were also cost implications that at a moment in time where prices are already high, where we've got limited capacity, to take that limited capacity behind the meter, out of the market, you would be basically spreading higher costs amongst fewer ratepayers at a really sensitive time and that drew concerns.
And so this has just been something that is really tough to deal with. And the Department of Energy, to their credit, kind of stepped in and issued this directive to FERC to say, "Hey, let's find a path forward where we can make some changes to the status quo and find a way that we win the AI race for national security purposes while not compromising reliability or affordability."
And I give DOE a lot of credit. Now, people immediately approached me about this after the DOE issuance because the last time DOE issued a significant directive to FERC was back in 2017 when I was chairman and it dealt with compensating baseload power plants for having the attribute of onsite fuel, namely coal and nuclear plants. And I mentioned earlier, I was still making the transition from Mitch McConnell's coal aide to independent regulator and I botched it and it was seen as a really politicized exercise.
Even though Secretary of Energy Rick Perry at the time raised a very relevant issue, I mismanaged it. And there was this sense that at the time Trump's DOE was trying to micromanage independent agency FERC and people thought again when they saw this, "Oh, here goes DOE again under Secretary Wright trying to push FERC around." That's not what they did here. I thought this was a very elegant proposal. It was thoughtful and substantive that kind of ripped off the band-aid and said, "Hey, the status quo is not working. We think we need reforms. We trust the experts at FERC, not just the chair and the commissioners, but the staff to get this right. We're going to give you the latitude to do it, but this is kind of the outcome that we would like to see." It's going to be hard because changing the status quo is always a challenge.
You have entrenched interests that don't want to change course, but I think what DOE did was the right thing to do. It's a critical issue, not just national security and economically and energy-wise and climate change-wise. I think it's the biggest issue in the energy space right now, and I applaud DOE for taking some leadership on it. I don't envy my former colleagues at FERC. I think it's a little bit unfair that unelected bureaucrats who are appointed to these positions are having to make these monumentally consequential decisions. I would prefer they come from Congress and the White House, but in the absence of that, no better people to do it than the folks at FERC to help navigate this thing.
Brad Langley: Neil, we called this show With Great Power, which is a nod to the energy industry. It's also a famous Spider-Man quote: with great power comes great responsibility. So I'm curious, what superpower do you bring to the energy transition?
Neil Chatterjee: Honestly, it's funny. I used to joke around with people that my superpower was FOMO, the fear of missing out. I show up at everything. I do every podcast. I speak at every conference. I go to every meeting. I meet with every lawmaker. I talk to every reporter that will call me. I meet with folks from clean energy to fossil fuels to investors. I don't sleep. I don't eat well. I travel constantly. I probably annoy my wife and kids, but I try to be maximally involved and that is my superpower. There are people much smarter than me. There are people much more experienced than me. There are people that are much better communicators than me. No one's going to outwork me, but what drives me is that FOMO, that fear of missing out, that fear of, oh man, there was an opportunity to shape things in the right direction and I wasn't there.
So I show up at everything and that in and of itself, just showing up, can be a superpower.
Brad Langley: Well, thank you, Neil, for showing up on this show. Amazing conversation and really do appreciate your time.
Neil Chatterjee: Thank you so much for having me.
Brad Langley: Neil Chatterjee is chief government affairs officer at Palmetto. With Great Power is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. Delivering on our clean energy future is complex. GridX exists to simplify the journey. GridX is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy, all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid.
Mary Catherine O'Connor produced the show. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed the show. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley.
If this show is providing value for you and we really hope it is, we'd love it if you could help us spread the word. You can rate or review us on Apple and Spotify, or you can share a link with a friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life.
As always, thanks for listening. I'm Brad Langley.