Energy
PROPOSED / DRAFT — ENERGY, GRID RELIABILITY & CONSERVATION
POSITION
America should pursue energy abundance, reliability, affordability, environmental responsibility, and national security. Technologies should be judged by measurable performance rather than political fashion.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Reliable energy supports households, hospitals, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, communications, defense, and every other part of modern life. Energy shortages and fragile grids raise costs and create public-safety risks.
RELIABLE GENERATION
MPA supports a diverse energy system that may include:
Existing and advanced nuclear power
Domestic oil and natural gas produced under enforceable standards
Geothermal power
Hydroelectric power
Economically viable renewable generation
Energy storage
Research into future energy systems
Nuclear power should become a major component of America’s future energy strategy. Licensing should maintain rigorous safety requirements while establishing clear decisions, predictable schedules, and efficient review of standardized reactor designs.
NEXT-CENTURY NUCLEAR POWER
Small modular reactors, advanced reactors, existing safe nuclear plants, and future fusion systems should form a major part of America's next century of reliable power. Nuclear safety must remain rigorous, but delay, duplication, unclear standards, and political obstruction are not safety.
The Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, national laboratories, states, utilities, manufacturers, labor, and private investors should maintain a ten-year national deployment roadmap. The initial objective should be a competitive path for at least three distinct United States small modular or advanced-reactor designs to reach demonstration or initial commercial operation within ten years, subject to safety, licensing, appropriations, and verified milestone performance.
Federal support must not become an open-ended corporate subsidy. Competitive awards should use private cost sharing, fixed milestone payments, independent technical review, public accounting, recovery of unearned funds, and termination of a project that repeatedly misses material safety, cost, or performance milestones without good cause.
CLEAR, SAFE & REUSABLE NUCLEAR LICENSING
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission should use a technology-inclusive, risk-informed, and performance-based framework. It must remain independent and responsible for public health, safety, security, safeguards, emergency planning, and environmental review.
Within 60 calendar days after receiving an application, the Commission must accept it or provide one consolidated list of material information required for acceptance.
Within 30 calendar days after acceptance, the Commission must publish a project schedule, review milestones, responsible offices, hearing opportunities, and expected decision date.
A complete first-of-a-kind design, manufacturing, construction, or combined-license review should receive a final decision within 24 months.
A site-specific application using an already certified design should receive a final decision within 18 months unless a material site condition, design change, safety issue, or controlling legal requirement justifies more time.
A certified standardized design should not be reviewed from the beginning for every identical unit. Review should focus on the site, authorized changes, operating organization, emergency planning, and new material evidence.
Applicant delay pauses the schedule for the documented period of delay. Any agency extension must identify the unresolved safety or legal issue, the work remaining, and the shortest reasonable new schedule. A missed deadline never creates automatic approval. It creates a right to expedited independent review and a binding completion schedule.
No reactor may operate without an approved plan for fuel supply, spent-fuel handling, decommissioning, emergency response, physical security, cybersecurity, financial responsibility, and protection of water and neighboring communities. America should expand secure domestic nuclear fuel, enrichment, component, manufacturing, and skilled-labor capacity while continuing research into recycling, advanced fuels, and long-term waste disposal.
FUSION & NEXT-GENERATION ENERGY
The United States should pursue commercially useful fusion power, advanced geothermal energy, long-duration storage, improved fission, high-efficiency generation, and other next-generation technologies without pretending that an experimental technology is already commercially proven.
The Department of Energy should publish and update an annual fusion roadmap aimed at commercially relevant pilot readiness during the 2030s. Public-private projects should be funded only after independent milestone verification. Results paid for by the public should be published to the maximum extent consistent with national security and legitimate intellectual-property protection.
Fusion regulation should be clear before commercial deployment and proportionate to the actual hazards of the specific technology. Fusion should not automatically inherit every rule written for a conventional fission reactor when the risk, materials, waste, and accident pathways are materially different.
PERSONAL & LOCAL ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
A home, farm, small business, commercial facility, neighborhood, or community should be free to produce, store, and manage lawful energy through personal solar, batteries, backup generators, combined heat and power, microgrids, or another safe distributed system.
Government, utilities, and homeowners associations may enforce reasonable electrical, fire, structural, noise, exhaust, fuel-storage, worker-safety, anti-backfeed, and reconnection standards. They may not impose an arbitrary ban, excessive fee, forced purchase, exclusive-vendor requirement, unnecessary remote-control requirement, or aesthetic rule whose practical effect is preventing a safe system.
A simple residential permit or interconnection request must receive a completeness decision within 15 business days and a final decision within 30 calendar days after completion.
A non-residential or community system that does not require major grid reconstruction must receive a final written decision within 30 calendar days after the application is complete.
Fees must be published, limited to reasonable actual cost, and proportionate to the work required.
A denial must identify the specific safety, capacity, or reliability reason, the supporting engineering evidence, and the corrective options. An independent appeal must be decided within the next 30 calendar days. A complaint or final independent review must conclude within the following 30 calendar days. On day 91, administrative remedies are exhausted and the applicant may seek judicial review.
Every grid-connected system must prevent unsafe backfeed and support safe islanding and reconnection where the equipment is designed to operate during an outage.
A customer may choose equipment that can operate locally without the internet or a manufacturer's cloud service. A utility may require a protective function necessary for grid safety, but it may not require unrelated surveillance or remote control as a condition of interconnection.
GRID HARDENING & RAPID RECOVERY
The bulk-power and distribution systems should be hardened against severe weather, wildfire, flood, ice, physical attack, cyberattack, electromagnetic and geomagnetic disturbance, equipment failure, supply-chain disruption, and fuel interruption according to the actual risk and consequence of failure.
Every responsible bulk-power operator and distribution utility must complete a documented risk assessment at least every two years, maintain a five-year hardening and recovery plan, update it annually, and submit evidence of completed work to its regulator. Sensitive diagrams, vulnerabilities, access details, and response procedures must be protected from public release while performance and spending remain auditable.
Risk-based plans should address:
hardening, relocation, elevation, undergrounding, replacement, or redundancy where supported by engineering and lifecycle cost;
vegetation, wildfire, flood, wind, ice, heat, corrosion, and drainage management;
redundant control, communications, protection, and power paths;
domestic production and secure inventories of transformers, breakers, relays, conductors, control equipment, fuel, and other long-lead components;
mobile transformers, mutual-aid agreements, transport routes, installation crews, and pre-engineered replacement plans;
black-start, islanding, load-shedding, restoration, and manual-operation procedures;
physical and cyber protection of generation plants, transmission lines, distribution systems, control centers, substations, and switchyards; and
service restoration for hospitals, emergency services, water and wastewater systems, communications, fuel distribution, shelters, defense facilities, and other critical loads.
DOE should coordinate a national strategic reserve and logistics system for large power transformers and other long-lead critical components. The reserve must be independently inventoried, protected, maintained, and exercised. It must complement rather than replace utility responsibility.
Each region must conduct at least one black-start and major restoration exercise every year and publish a non-sensitive after-action report within 60 calendar days. Material failures identified in an exercise must receive a funded correction plan within 90 calendar days.
CRITICAL FACILITY SECURITY
Power plants, primary control centers, high-consequence transmission facilities, critical substations, switchyards, fuel facilities, and recovery-equipment sites must receive risk-based physical security appropriate to the consequences of their loss.
Protection may include controlled access, barriers, stand-off distance, lighting, intrusion detection, surveillance, tamper alarms, hardened enclosures, protected communications, trained response, redundant control locations, and coordination with law enforcement. Security must be independently tested rather than certified only on paper.
Critical operational systems must support safe local operation, tested manual controls, physical network segmentation, and a physical means to isolate external communications and remote command paths. Isolation must not unnecessarily disable protective relays, emergency shutdown, life-safety systems, or other functions required to place equipment in a safe condition. Detailed requirements appear in the National Cybersecurity Standards & Trusted Personnel policy.
CRITICAL LOAD SELF-POWER
A hospital, emergency communications center, public-safety facility, designated shelter, critical water or wastewater facility, and other designated life-safety site must maintain a tested plan capable of supporting essential operations for at least 72 hours without normal grid service. Longer endurance may be required where local risk, remoteness, evacuation limits, or restoration history justifies it.
Compliance may use generators, batteries, microgrids, combined heat and power, fuel cells, local generation, mutual support, or another verified combination. Fuel, maintenance, load priority, testing, staffing, and safe islanding must be part of the plan.
RESPONSIBLE AUTHORITIES & ACCOUNTABILITY
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission remains responsible for civilian nuclear safety, security, safeguards, licensing, inspection, and enforcement.
The Department of Energy leads research, demonstrations, supply-chain development, transformer resilience, national laboratories, and competitive milestone programs.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation establish and enforce lawful bulk-power reliability and security requirements.
State public utility commissions oversee distribution investment, customer costs, local reliability, and fair interconnection within their authority.
CISA, sector regulators, utilities, and law enforcement coordinate threat information and critical-infrastructure cybersecurity without publicly exposing exploitable details.
Federal grants, loan guarantees, tax benefits, and rate recovery must be tied to verified construction, delivery, reliability, security, and cost milestones. Unspent or improperly used funds must be recovered. Annual public reporting must show project cost, schedule, generation added, outage performance, restoration time, domestic content, safety results, and whether the promised benefit was delivered.
Core MPA standard: Build abundant power for the next century, protect the systems that deliver it, let Americans produce their own lawful energy, and measure success by safety, reliability, affordability, resilience, and work actually completed.
GRID MODERNIZATION
Utilities and regulators should publish long-term assessments of generation, transmission, distribution, storage, peak demand, extreme-weather risk, cybersecurity, and emergency restoration.
MPA supports modern transmission, protection of critical substations, replacement of failing equipment, vegetation and wildfire management, interoperable emergency plans, and stronger physical and cyber protection of critical infrastructure.
Costs should be allocated transparently. Residential customers and existing small businesses should not unknowingly subsidize special infrastructure or preferential rates for a private project.
DOMESTIC PRODUCTION & SUPPLY CHAINS
Government should identify critical energy equipment, fuels, transformers, grid components, minerals, and manufacturing capacity vulnerable to foreign disruption. Policy should encourage competitive domestic and allied supply without concealing costs or granting permanent protection to inefficient favored companies.
REFINERY CAPACITY & ESSENTIAL NATIONAL PROJECTS
America should execute a 20-year plan for 60 new oil refineries, located mostly in appropriate coastal and port regions but distributed throughout the country for resilience. Each planned site should use approximately 1,100 acres and provide capacity of at least 500,000 barrels per day. Older facilities should be retired, dismantled, remediated, and recycled through a coordinated 30-year plan after safe replacement capacity is operating.
A defined federal process may approve and, when strictly necessary, preempt conflicting state or local action for a project proven essential to national growth, defense, public need, economic security, or independence. The complete standards for evidence, public notice, state and local participation, environmental and safety review, property rights, compensation, judicial review, and anti-abuse safeguards appear in Essential National Projects & Refinery Modernization.
PERMITTING & ACCOUNTABILITY
Permitting should be timely, evidence-based, and coordinated across agencies. Applicants should receive clear requirements and decision schedules. Faster review must not eliminate meaningful analysis of water, air, land, wildlife, public safety, tribal interests, property rights, or local infrastructure.
ENVIRONMENT & CONSERVATION
America should have both prosperity and a clean environment.
Protect:
Clean water and air
Wildlife and habitat
Forests and public lands
Groundwater
Productive farmland
Actual polluters should be held accountable for measurable harm. Environmental rules should identify the harm addressed, expected benefit, compliance cost, responsible authority, and method for measuring results.
WHAT WE WILL MEASURE
Public reporting should track electricity reliability, outage duration, household and industrial energy costs, reserve margins, interconnection and permitting time, infrastructure failures, domestic production capacity, emissions and pollution outcomes, land and water impacts, and restoration performance after emergencies.
Related policies: Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Media & Automated Accounts; Data Centers & Digital Infrastructure; Cost of Living & Economic Security; Foreign Affairs; Owner Rights; Environment, Conservation & Natural Resources; National Cybersecurity Standards & Trusted Personnel.
Status: Proposed / Draft — not yet formally adopted.
Originally published: August 15, 2026.
Last updated: October 3, 2026.
Version: Draft 0.5.