2025 Transmission Planning and Development Report Card: Assessing Progress and Shortfalls as Demand Accelerates Nationwide
Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG)Zach Zimmerman, Adria E. Brooks, Rob Gramlich, Nathan Shreve, Danish Jamal01 Feb 2026all-rights-reservedRead the original
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Americans for a Clean Energy Grid grades ten US transmission regions on the quality of their planning and development practices. This edition reports incremental improvement across most regions, driven by reforms to regional planning and by FERC Order No. 1920, which established requirements for long-term regional transmission planning — though every region received an extension to its compliance filing deadline. The report's central criticism is that interregional transmission remains the weakest element of the national planning picture, with planned capacity falling well short of estimated need, even though ACEG argues interregional lines offer some of the highest benefit-cost ratios available to consumers. It sets this against accelerating demand, citing the rise in the five-year nationwide summer peak load growth forecast from 24 GW in 2022 to 166 GW in 2025. Grades vary widely between regions.
Contested
Quotation
“"Interregional transmission remains one of the weakest elements of the national planning landscape."”
Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG) · all-rights-reserved · Read the original
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The MyGreenSuit briefing
Commentary by MyGreenSuit, not the words of Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG).
Treat the grades as advocacy, because they are — ACEG designed the criteria and ACEG is campaigning for more transmission. That does not make the scoring dishonest, but it does mean the letters are an argument rather than an audit. I have deliberately not reproduced any specific regional grade here; the table needs checking against the source PDF before anyone quotes one.
The finding that stands independent of the scoring is the compliance timetable. FERC Order 1920 was supposed to force long-term regional transmission planning. Every single region received an extension on its compliance filing.
That is the story. Not that regions are performing differently, but that a binding federal requirement bent uniformly on contact with the industry it was meant to bind. Whatever one thinks about how much transmission America needs, a rule everybody gets an extension from is not a rule.
The useful follow-up is which regions actually filed, when, and what changed as a result — which nobody appears to be tracking.