Federal regulators last week determined that electric utilities could recover cybersecurity investments when designing rate structures, but disregarded calls to extend the favor to natural gas pipelines. 

The FERC ruling stems from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s (IIJA) direction for federal agencies to secure energy infrastructure against all physical and cyber threats (No. RM22-19-000). 

“In today’s highly interconnected world, our nation’s security and economic well-being depend on reliable and cyber-resilient energy infrastructure,” said Chairman Willie Phillips. “We must continue to build upon the mandatory framework of our cybersecurity reliability standards with efforts such as this to encourage utilities to proactively make additional...