neil chatterjee is a former chairman of the federal energy regulatory commission (ferc), where he served from 2017 to 2021 under president donald trump. he previously spent nearly a decade as senate majority leader mitch mcconnell (r-ky.)’s top energy aide and also worked at the national rural electric cooperative association.

as ferc chairman, chatterjee was known for supporting market-based approaches to clean energy. since leaving government, he has advised the global law firm hogan lovells and serves on the boards of energy and climate tech startups, including aidash, as well as venture capital funds such as overture vc. chatterjee discussed his tenure as a key authority on energy policy, his stance on depoliticizing energy issues, the pressure that artificial-intelligence demand is placing on the grid, and his move from regulator to industry adviser.

the interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

eshaan mani: you’ve said one of your goals was to “make energy policy boring again” — meaning technocratic, not ideological. if you were designing process reforms to this end, what would they look like?

neil chatterjee: i think it’s actually an antiquated notion that if you are for fossil fuels or firm generation, you’re on the political right, and if you’re for clean energy climate solutions, you’re on the political left. this wasn’t always the case.

when i first came to washington as a young aide, the chairman and the ranking member of the senate energy and natural resources committee, which is the principal committee with jurisdiction over energy policy, were one republican and one democrat, pete domenici and jeff bingaman, both of whom were from new mexico. in those early years of the george w. bush administration, the majority in the senate actually toggled back and forth several times, but the agenda of the energy committee never changed. domenici and bingaman were doing what was in the best interest of new mexico, not the republican or democratic parties.

there was a period of time when energy wasn’t political, and over the last 20 years, because we’ve been the beneficiaries of relatively flat energy demand, we’ve enabled politics to affect the process. today, politicians, celebrities, and entrepreneurs are making decisions that engineers used to make. i want to get back to empowering the engineers to make these complex calls around things like resource adequacy. i think in order to win the ai race for national security purposes, we’re going to need so much power, and we’re going to have to sort out such serious issues that it’s going to cause us to come out of our partisan conflicts over energy.

em: artificial intelligence (ai) is driving huge new electricity demand, but transmission projects face permitting delays and long interconnection queues. how can we speed up grid expansion to meet this demand?

nc: it starts with human resources, with college students who don’t go to wall street, but [who] go and work in a regional transmission organization (rto), independent system operator (iso), or ferc. we need more young people who are smart enough to do the studies and to advocate for due process. there’s a genuine demographic cliff that’s occurring where we’re seeing a lot of senior expertise in the energy field retire. then we got dummies like me in the middle, and we don’t have enough young people. this is important, substantive work. 

additionally, i think this is an area where ai can genuinely benefit us. people have mixed views about ai. it’s going to require a tremendous amount of power, which is going to put huge demands on the grid, but let’s think about the positives. we can utilize ai for greater efficiency in our studies and even in regulatory practices. i do think it can help expedite our work. you can pair things like residential rooftop solar; energy storage; heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (hvac); and electric vehicles (evs), and have your whole home as a marketplace with ai governing it all. 

we also need to further the orders ferc has passed, like order 2023, which looked to eliminate or screen out speculative projects, and enable solar-plus storage to apply together and not require different studies. 

with regard to all of these, i think chairman willie phillips, a good friend of mine who oversaw the order, would tell you that none of this is a silver bullet that’s going to solve the equation, but at least puts us in the right direction.

em: you worked in congress, at the national rural electric cooperative association, and then at ferc. what did each of these show you about how u.s. energy policy gets made?

nc: in my first job as a staffer in congress, i actually didn’t think i’d work in energy. i knew i wanted to serve my country in some capacity. i was in business school on sept. 11, 2001, and decided that i needed to do something for my country. but i wasn’t sure how i would go about it.

i got an opportunity through a friend to get an internship in d.c. my parents are both in cancer research, so i thought i’d work in healthcare, but it wasn’t available, but an energy job was. my very first entry-level job was in energy and electricity policy, and it opened my eyes to the arena. 

my stint with the national rural electric cooperative association was like my ph.d. in electricity policy. i really got into the weeds and built upon that introductory experience i had as a young congressional aide. then i got to work for sen. mitch mcconnell as his principal energy advisor, the senate’s top energy policy advisor. it was just an awesome experience. 

then i went from being his advisor to a principal myself, as commissioner and chairman of ferc. i had a lot of ability to influence the processes as an aide to sen. mcconnell, but at the end of the day, he’s the one passing the vote. when i went to ferc, i held the reins. 

each step has been rewarding and challenging in its own right. senator mcconnell was great to work with. i’m from lexington, ky. being from a small, rural state, it’s quite inspiring to have your guy as the erstwhile majority leader of the united states senate. 

em: in 2018–19, ferc expanded pennsylvania-new jersey-maryland interconnection’s (pjm) minimum offer price rule (mopr) to include state-supported resources like renewables and nuclear. the rule sparked debate over its impact on capacity prices and state policy alignment. looking back, is there anything you would approach differently about that decision?

nc: in retrospect, i was completely right, and i think i’m being vindicated. my critical mistake came before the imposition of the mopr. at the time, i had been considering a notice of proposed rulemaking at the department of energy (doe) on compensating base load power, mainly coal and nuclear, for having fuel on-site. that was immediately perceived as a massive bailout for coal and nuclear.

my mistake wasn’t in how i voted. the mistake was in how i handled it. i approached it like a politician rather than as an independent regulator. by speaking about it in political terms, i injected unnecessary politics into the broader debate.

when the mopr came around, i genuinely believed i was protecting the market. it was about efficient market function and accurate price signaling. i thought it was a technical, wonky issue, but because of how i mishandled the doe proposal, people perceived it as political. they assumed i was hostile to renewables or clean energy, which was never the case. i was simply trying to protect the market. here we are, six years later, looking at the pjm capacity auction results, and the prices are through the roof. 

em: you now serve as chief government affairs officer at palmetto, while also advising companies like aidash and funds like overture vc. having moved from the regulatory side at ferc to the industry and investment side, how has that transition reshaped your perspective on how policy actually lands in the market? 

nc: i don’t think anything shifted. i felt like, during my tenure in government, once i had a platform of my own, and i wasn’t an aide to someone else, i could stand on my own record. i established myself as a conservative who cares about decarbonization, but wanted to do it in a market-based and efficient way. 

if you look at the through line through all the work i do, whether it be as chief government affairs officer at palmetto, industry advisor to kohlberg kravis roberts & co. (kkr), or any of the various boards that i serve on, they’re all squarely in that wheelhouse of entities that are trying to do well and do right. they actually care about the planet and resilience. they care about decarbonizing in an efficient, market-based way, not a political or onerous way. i’m just trying to walk the walk after my time in government.