Report: U.S. Needs More Gas Infrastructure to Fortify the Grid
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The U.S. power grid needs additional gas infrastructure to meet future demand, according to a report from the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC). This includes both pipelines and storage projects, and the report offers several recommendations around this.
Detailing the Need for More Gas Infrastructure
Recent events like Texas’ Winter Storm Uri in Feb. 2021 demonstrated the need to bolster gas infrastructure. As such, industry improvements have been under discussion for several years at this point, and this new report is aligned with those efforts.
This new 44-page report was published Nov. 2025 by NARUC’s Gas-Electric Alignment for Reliability (GEAR) task force, which was launched in 2023 with the objective to improve the reliability of the power grid by enhancing gas and electric coordination or “harmonization.”
The report outlines the following recommendations to bolster this intra-sector coordination:
- Creating and launching a natural gas readiness forum.
- Building additional gas storage and pipeline assets.
- Introducing better market mechanisms to improve extreme-weather performance.
- Developing new natural gas demand response tactics.
- Developing incentives for pipeline projects.
- Improving oversight of load-shed efforts.
A few potential recommendations that were discussed were ultimately not adopted. These include the creation of a Gas Reliability Organization, similar to the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC); aligning the timing associated with gas and electric market schedules, which currently are several hours apart; and making changes to standard force majeure contract provisions that cover supply disruptions.
It’s not clear what the next steps are, aside from additional feasibility studies and vetting. Regardless, I think this is a great step in the direction of achieving better gas-electric coordination.
The downside is that anytime we’re talking about new assets – i.e., new gas infrastructure like pipelines and storage facilities – it’s not exactly a quick turnaround. The recommendations put forth in the report are ambitious and will take a decent amount of time to implement.
That said, I applaud this as a terrific first step. Future reliability will depend on gas-electric coordination, and if building new gas infrastructure is the key to doing this, then I’m all for it!
