Five people will make a decision soon that will have an outsized impact on the future of renewable energy in America. I’m not talking about big shots like Obama, Koch, Boehner, Bloomberg, or Steyer. I’m talking about names many have never heard of:  Moeller, Norris, LaFleur, Clark, and Binz (if he is confirmed). These are the chief electricity officers of the United States of America — they are the commissioners of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

You’ve probably heard this before: “Scientists agree that in order to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we must generate 80 percent of our energy from renewable sources by 2050.”  No single entity will play as crucial a role as FERC in ensuring that the infrastructure exists to handle new renewable energy generation.

President Obama’s climate plan is a courageous step forward and deserves the widespread media coverage it has received. But only the acceleration of utility-scale renewable energy projects can take us where we need to go.

Modernizing our nation’s power system is a daunting task, but there are good reasons to be optimistic. America has enough wind and solar to power the entire country more than a dozen times over. And with the cost of wind and solar going down every day, rapid development of large-scale generation projects appears inevitable.

But if you place the map of regions with the best wind and solar energy on top of a map of our current transmission system, you won’t find too much overlap. Transmission is the key to unlocking America’s virtually unlimited renewable resources and delivering their energy to users.

Unlike our interstate highway system, which is funded by taxpayers, high-voltage transmission lines are built with private capital. Investors will put money into transmission projects as long as they generate returns that are attractive relative to similar types of investments. This is where FERC steps in. They set the return on equity (ROE) for transmission projects across the nation.

As you might imagine, the higher the ROE, the more incentive there is to build transmission. A company would never invest in our grid if the maximum ROE was 1 percent — meaning it would take 100 years to recoup the costs of a project. And if it was 100 percent, we would end up building much more transmission than we need and sticking consumers with the bill.

Recent history also tells us that the cost of inadequate transmission is steep. Electric customers are still paying billions of dollars per year for congestion, poor reliability, and overpriced power from dirty, outdated, and inefficient power plants — all of which are the direct result of three decades of underinvestment in transmission. Renewable energy was locked out of a strained and inadequate grid. In the mid-2000s, FERC recognized the chronic neglect of transmission investments as a major burden on ratepayers and a barrier to modernizing our electric system, and stepped in to raise transmission ROEs.

That decision helped spur a wave of new transmission investments that are reducing costs to consumers and expanding access to renewable energy. For example, the Midwest ISO has begun a new set of transmission lines called the MVP projects. The average consumer is seeing $23 in savings for every $11 spent these new lines.

Why is transmission such a great deal for electric customers? It’s the smallest part of an electric bill — 11 percent on average — compared with 58 percent for generation and 31 percent for distribution. Transmission pays for itself quickly by relieving costly congestion, moving cheap and clean renewable power to customers, making the grid more reliable and secure, and putting old and inefficient power plants out of business. Simply put, transmission is essential infrastructure for competition, consumer choice, economic efficiency, and environmental protection.

Despite the well-documented value that transmission investments deliver to ratepayers and the environment, FERC has been hearing complaints recently that ROEs for transmission projects are too high, and that ratepayers need relief. These complaints are misguided, and their timing could not be worse. Never in our history has so much depended on expanding and modernizing our electric transmission system.

Our chief electricity officers may never get the ROE for transmission “just right”; the uncertainty of markets, interest rates, and the economy probably make that lofty goal impossible to achieve. But they can — and they must — ensure that ROEs remain at levels that ensure a steady and stable flow of private capital into urgently needed transmission investments. Failing to do so would stall renewable energy development and with it progress on reducing emissions, and would increase the cost of electricity for everyone.

The president’s climate plan is moving forward. State renewable energy standards are helping expedite that progress. The falling costs of wind and solar are driving growth. But none of that will matter if the infrastructure to deliver renewable energy to customers is not built.

Five FERC commissioners will make a little-noticed decision in the near future, one that will either keep us on the right track, or throw a major obstacle — one that we can ill-afford — on the road to achieving our nation’s renewable energy future and stabilizing our world’s climate.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Alaska, by the looks of it, is on track for a double apocalypse.

The home of Sarah “global warming my gluteus maximus” Palin faces a daunting confluence of climate-related challenges, from rising seas to gushing glaciers to massive wildfires. Even Mayor Stubbs (who we’d expect to be cool about this kind of thing) won’t answer questions about the state’s fate.

Raging blazes in Arizona and Colorado have dominated wildfire news in recent years, but the biggest fires of the past decade burned in Alaska, which is warming twice as fast as the lower 48 states. There, flames have swallowed more than a half-million acres at a time (that’s 781 square miles) of boreal forest, the landscape of spruce and fir trees dominant below the Arctic Circle. And a new study says that this fiery phase is here to stay. From the L.A. Times:

A warming climate could promote so much wildfire in the boreal zone that the forests may convert to deciduous woodlands of aspen and birch, researchers said.

“In the last few decades we have seen this extreme combination of high severity and high frequency” wildfire in the study area of interior Alaska’s Yukon Flats, said University of Illinois plant biology Prof. Feng Sheng Hu. …

Accelerated wildfire could also unlock vast amounts of forest carbon, contributing to greenhouse gases. “The more important implication there is [that] you’re probably going to release a substantial fraction of the carbon that has been stored in the soil,” Hu said.

In contrast, Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier, outside Juneau, threatens to wreak chilly destruction, reports The New York Times:

Starting in July 2011, and each year since, sudden torrents of water shooting out from beneath the glacier have become a new facet of Juneau’s brief, shimmering high summer season. In that first, and so far biggest, measured flood burst, an estimated 10 billion gallons gushed out in three days, threatening homes and property along the Mendenhall River that winds through part of the city. There have been at least two smaller bursts this year. …

Water from snowmelt, rain and thawing ice are combining in new ways, researchers said — first pooling in an ice-covered depression near the glacier called Suicide Basin, then finding a way to flow downhill.

What prompts a surge … is pressure. As water builds up in the basin and seeks an outlet, it can actually lift portions of the glacier ever so slightly, and in that lift, the water finds a release. Under the vast pressure of the ice bearing down upon it, the water explodes out into the depths of Mendenhall Lake and from there into the river.

The phenomenon is not unique to Alaska. Scientists call it jokulhlaup, an Icelandic word meaning “glacier leap.” Though the name suggests an eccentric backcountry sporting event or maybe an elfin dance move, there’s nothing jolly about it. Mendenhall, unlike most glaciers, is far from isolated: 14 miles from downtown Juneau, it’s one of the most visited glaciers in the world, attracting 400,000 tourists a year. That means that its tendency to leap poses huge risks to people and property, and local officials are scrambling to keep a close eye on it. The city of Juneau kicked in part of the cost to install a pressure transducer, which gauges water buildup and transmits real-time results back to monitors via satellite. Meteorologists say the warmer, wetter weather the Juneau area could see in coming decades could increase runoff and spur more frequent surges.

If only there were a way to make these glaciers leap on over to the burning boreal forest, where they could actually do some good. I’d suggest some kind of pipeline, but I think they’re all in use.