Policy and Energy Notes with Neil: Endangerment Finding, Electricity Demand, and Coal

The Winter Olympics are in full swing in Milan, and so are things in the energy policy world in the United States. Energy demand is rising, and one major climate finding is falling. What does it all mean?

Neil Chatterjee, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Palmetto’s Chief Governmental Affairs Officer, sat down to make sense of it all — and cheer on Team USA.

Watch the full remarks or read the highlights below. This conversation was recorded on the morning of Thursday, February 12, 2026.

On energy demand and capacity

At the center of it all continues to be this conversation around electricity prices and growing demand and how we are going to support data centers while maintaining affordability and reliability.

Last month, the PJM governors — PJM is the largest competitive wholesale power market in the US, comprising 13 states and the District of Columbia — all of the governors in the PJM footprint came together with the Trump administration and laid out a set of principles for how to move forward on this. It just goes to show you that there’s bipartisan support for getting this right.

We saw reporting this week that the White House is considering a compact among data centers that they will have to abide by certain guidelines around energy and water consumption and that they're going to make a commitment to protect consumers from price increases. We still need to see what the details of this compact will look like, but it's just further indication that this is going to be the premier issue in the energy policy space in 2026 and probably beyond.

On moves around coal generation

The White House rolled out a number of announcements regarding coal fire generation. They called on the Department of Defense to prioritize long-term coal contracts in fueling the military's energy needs. They also took steps to keep open a number of coal plants that were being considered to be retired. 

As a native Kentuckian, I have deep sympathy for the plight of people in coal communities, and I want to do everything we can to help these folks. But some of these actions, quite frankly I'm nervous, are going to lead to higher electricity prices. The positive side for that is it will create more opportunity for tech-driven behind the meter solutions

On the Endangerment Finding

And the big news today (again, this is Thursday), later today the White House and EPA are going to announce that they are undoing the 2009 Endangerment Finding which underpinned climate regulation out of EPA. This is going to have tremendous significance symbolically and politically. It's going to garner a lot of attention. 

But there have been some analysts who observed that the momentum for the clean energy transition is such that the reversal may slow emissions reductions from the US, but it's not going to stop the trend of shifting towards cleaner and cleaner energy. As the costs for clean energy continue to come down, consumers are more and more interested and we're going to continue to see accelerated deployment.