The Forum was moderated by John Geraghty, National Practice Leader of Energy & Infrastructure at Marshall & Stevens. Panelists included Bobby Majumder, Partner and Co-Chair of the Energy Industry Team at FBT Gibbons; Ken Malik, Head of Project Development at Grupo Cobra; Brent Nelson, Senior Managing Director of Markets and Strategy at Ascend Analytics; and Fahad Siddiqui, Director of Structured Finance at TotalEnergies.
“If you’re going to hope for anything, hope for permit reform.” Brent Nelson framed the policy discussion bluntly.
At the Forum, the regulatory discussion produced a notably candid assessment of the current policy landscape. Here’s what the discussion uncovered:
FEOC guidance is genuinely unclear, and the market is waiting for a standard
The IRA’s Foreign Entity of Concern provisions were designed to incentivize domestic supply chains. In practice, as of May 2026, developers and banks still lack clear guidance on what compliance requires in every scenario.
Grupo Cobra’s Ken Malik surfaced a specific structural problem: utility upgrades to interconnection infrastructure may affect FEOC-related incentive exposure even when the developer has no control over the utility’s own supply chain.
TotalEnergies’ Fahad Siddiqui summed up the market position:
“I don’t think there’s any clarity on FEOC. I don’t think there’s any developer who has clarity. We’re all looking at it in real time, trying to figure it out.”
For practitioners in any role across the energy ecosystem, FEOC is an open question with live transaction implications, waiting for a market standard that has not yet emerged.
The OBBBA changed the math, and the market is adjusting
The July 2025 enactment of the OBBBA introduced a new level of uncertainty around incentive durability.
The result, as reflected across the panel discussion, is active sell pressure on renewable assets whose economics no longer work as cleanly without subsidies, alongside a growing divergence between projects grounded in supply-and-demand fundamentals and those that remain heavily incentive-dependent.
The discussion suggested that many market participants are increasingly underwriting projects with less confidence in long-term incentive stability.
The question for practitioners is how to advise clients building 30-year assets in a policy environment that can shift materially over short political cycles.
Project Economics Must Outlast Political Cycles
Brent Nelson offered very useful framing of how sophisticated players are managing political risk:
“It’s easy to get caught into what today’s political climate is. Gas plants built today won’t be online for five years. What does the political outlook look like then? Could be very different from today.”
The panel’s consensus was not that policy uncertainty should paralyze decision-making, but that project economics increasingly need to be evaluated across a range of policy outcomes over long asset lives.
The current administration’s priorities are not the permanent market signal. Decisions made today will outlast that administration by two decades.
The missing policy conversation is transmission
Both Ken Malik and Bobby Majumder called transmission infrastructure the most underhyped policy issue in the energy market right now. Malik was direct:
“Transmission scarcity, especially in regard to AI and delivering power from where it’s generated to where data centers are sited.”
Majumder went further:
“Our grid in the United States hasn’t had any meaningful upgrades since the 1970s.”
Much of the public conversation has focused on generation technology, solar versus gas versus nuclear. In the panel’s view, that focus is at least partially misdirected.
The constraint isn’t where power is made. It’s how it gets to where it’s needed. Until transmission reform becomes part of the policy agenda, generation investment alone will not resolve the reliability crisis.
The discussion pointed toward a practical approach: build around current rules, treat potential reinstatement as upside rather than a base-case assumption, and evaluate policy-dependent theses as risk-adjusted scenarios rather than settled foundations.
The market is already adjusting while policy remains unsettled.
The full conversation on what it takes to develop and finance projects in 2026 is available on demand. Watch the recording or download the 2026 Energy Outlook Report for our complete analysis.
