The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has reaffirmed one of its more procedurally significant recent rule changes, confirming the effective date of Order No. 915 in the face of a rehearing request from a broad coalition of environmental and public-interest groups. The action, published in the Federal Register on February 24, 2026, under Docket No. RM25-9-000, addresses arguments raised on rehearing and confirms that the underlying final rule took effect November 10, 2025.

The substance is narrow on its surface but consequential in practice. In October 2025, the Commission issued a final rule — Order No. 915 — amending its regulations to remove former Section 157.23 and to strike a cross-reference to it in Section 153.4. Those provisions had placed restrictions on issuing authorizations to proceed with the construction of natural gas facilities while a request for rehearing of the underlying certificate was still pending. Removing them means a project sponsor can, in the relevant circumstances, begin construction without waiting for the rehearing clock to run.

"On October 10, 2025, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Commission) published in the Federal Register a final rule removing regulations. This action addresses arguments raised on rehearing and confirms the effective date of that final rule."— FERC Confirmation Rule, Docket No. RM25-9-000, source

The rehearing was filed November 6, 2025, by a coalition the order lists as including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and more than a dozen regional and public-interest organizations. Their objection goes to a real tension in infrastructure permitting: when a project can start pouring concrete before the rehearing process concludes, the rehearing can become a formality, because facts on the ground accumulate while the legal challenge is still being heard.

Why a gas-infrastructure procedure matters to the grid-tech reader

This desk covers grid and energy IP, not pipeline politics, so the relevant question is what the procedural shift signals about deployment velocity across energy infrastructure generally. The construction-pending-rehearing question is fundamentally about the timing gap between a regulatory approval and the point at which a developer can commit capital and equipment. Procedural rules that compress that gap shift risk and accelerate build-out; rules that widen it slow deployment and raise financing costs. The same dynamic that governs gas facilities echoes across transmission lines and large interconnection projects, where the lag between approval and construction is one of the binding constraints on getting new capacity onto the grid.

The Commission's legal posture here is also instructive. The order notes that under the D.C. Circuit's en banc decision in Allegheny Defense Project v. FERC, the rehearing request could be deemed denied by operation of law. But rather than rest on that procedural default, the Commission invoked its authority under section 19(a) of the Natural Gas Act to modify its discussion while reaching the same result. In plain terms: the Commission chose to engage the petitioners' arguments and explain itself, then confirmed the rule stood and that its effective date was November 10, 2025.

The deployment signal

Read against the backdrop of the Commission's broader 2026 docket — from interconnection reform to the PJM governance conference — this confirmation fits a consistent pattern: an agency working to reduce the procedural drag between approval and construction. Whether that is the right balance is a genuine policy dispute, and the coalition that sought rehearing represents one side of it forcefully. But the directional signal for anyone modeling energy-infrastructure timelines is clear. The Commission is, at the margins, removing pauses rather than adding them.

The legal mechanics deserve a beat of attention because they recur across FERC's docket. The order leans on the D.C. Circuit's en banc ruling in Allegheny Defense Project v. FERC, which curtailed the Commission's old practice of issuing "tolling orders" that paused the rehearing clock indefinitely while a project moved forward. Allegheny held that a rehearing request not acted on within the statutory period is deemed denied by operation of law, which freed petitioners to seek judicial review. By invoking section 19(a) of the Natural Gas Act to modify its discussion and reaffirm the result, the Commission is operating within that post-Allegheny framework rather than around it — engaging the arguments on the merits instead of relying on procedural silence. For observers parsing how FERC defends its rules against rehearing challenges, that is the more durable posture, and it is the one the Commission has increasingly favored.

The broader takeaway for energy-infrastructure timelines is about predictability as much as speed. Financing a major project requires confidence that an approval, once granted, will translate into the ability to build on a knowable schedule. Rules that keep construction authorizations hostage to an open-ended rehearing process inject exactly the uncertainty that raises the cost of capital. Whether the offsetting harms the petitioning coalition raises — the risk that construction outpaces meaningful review — are adequately weighed is the live policy question, and one that will likely return in litigation. But the Commission's direction here is unambiguous.

The verifiable record is precise. Order No. 915 was published October 10, 2025; it removed former Section 157.23 and a cross-reference in Section 153.4; a coalition filed for rehearing November 6, 2025; and in this February 24, 2026 action under Docket No. RM25-9-000, the Commission addressed those arguments and confirmed the effective date of November 10, 2025. The full reasoning, including the modified discussion the Commission added in response to the rehearing arguments, is available in the Federal Register text and on the Commission's eLibrary under the docket number. For the deployment-watcher, it is one more data point in a year defined by the Commission's effort to move infrastructure from paper to construction faster.