Latest Updates
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BAAJA will revitalize American infrastructure investment
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 (BAAJA) will reshape the future of American infrastructure investment. Key provisions in the bill codify rules-of-the-road, eliminate discriminatory or unnecessary procedural bottlenecks, create new pathways to unlock projects, and change incentives for utilities and agencies. The important result is more certainty for clean energy projects that…
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BAAJA re-aligns incentives for utility investments
A significant amount of fresh investment in U.S. grid capacity is undertaken by investor-owned utilities. These utility investments and the rates of return on them are regulated by state utility commissions and, for transmission, by FERC. The deal for particular utilities is straightforward: invest in and maintain critical assets in exchange for a consistent, but…
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BAAJA blasts through the geothermal-fossil permitting parity gap
For two decades, oil and gas on federal land have had a faster permitting track than geothermal. A new Senate bill includes provisions that would close most of that gap.
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Public Development Community of Practice: Credit Enhancement of Municipal Bonds for Housing
Register for our upcoming Public Development Community of Practice (PDCOP) event on Thursday, October 29, from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM ET, which focuses on credit enhancement of municipal bonds for housing. Credit enhancement is a financial strategy that housing authorities, cities, counties, and states can use to secure better borrowing terms for housing by…
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Long-term liquidity for long-term public capital planning
The federal government has several options beyond what it authorized in BIL and IRA to empower state and local government investment in critical infrastructure that both lowers costs and helps drive decarbonization and resilience.
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The bipartisan permitting bill gets transmission right
The transmission and grid provisions in BAAJA are ambitious, going beyond the provisions of 2024’s EPRA bill. Most importantly, BAAJA gives FERC more statutory cover to take aggressive actions on grid development.
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Adapting regulatory structures from finance to frontier AI
This summer, two leading frontier AI labs disclosed that models they were testing had breached the systems of outside companies. In July, during an internal test of its hacking capabilities, an OpenAI model broke containment—extricating itself from its enclosed testing environment and reaching the open internet. Seven hundred agents spent roughly two and a half…
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National transmission needs study 2026
Our submission contributes to our team’s work identifying barriers to bankability for large-scale energy infrastructure and describing how public financing and planning tools can break coordination bottlenecks for transmission in particular, with benefits for the interconnection of large loads and clean energy generation resources.
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America’s Great Corridors of Commerce
The United States Department of Transportation’s Build America Bureau is requesting comments on its proposed America’s Great Corridors of Commerce (AGCC) program, a “voluntary, applicant-driven process in which [right-of-way (ROW)] owners propose corridors for strategic colocation of utility infrastructure in the transportation ROW through an innovative public-private partnership (P3) model“. CPE is pleased to offer…
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The Shadow Pipeline: Estimating Entitled-But-Not-Permitted Multifamily
Federal housing statistics track a well-known sequence: permits, starts, construction, completions. These data points, published monthly by the Census Bureau and widely followed by policymakers, economists, and industry analysts, form the basis of nearly every conversation about whether the United States is building enough housing. But there is a critical stage of the development process…