In 2023, the state of transmission in the U.S. was bleak. Data center-fueled load growth was beginning to take off; the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order 1920 hadn’t yet been finalized; and in a “report card” from two prominent grid organizations, only two regions (California and the Midwest) got above a C+.

The third edition of the report, out this week from Grid Strategies and Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, showed some improvement since then — but accelerating load growth means that a reliability gap is widening nonetheless.

The good news: Regional planning reforms have made real, if incremental progress, in many parts of the U.S. Part of this is due to 2024’s FERC Order 1920, which requires regions to align their transmission planning with best practices, has driven improvements even before full compliance is finalized. (The various RTOs and ISOs have staggered deadlines between 2025 and 2027.)

Since 2023, all but three regions have shown progress in their overall “grade.” Just Texas got worse (from a D+ to a D-), while both the Midwest and the Southeast stagnated, with a B and an F, respectively.

And California in particular is improving significantly, moving from a B to an A- in the last two years. The state is particularly strong on regional planning, helped by continued coordination between the Public Utilities Commission, California Energy Commission, and CAISO; it also has transitioned from planning on 10-year to 20-year horizons, which the report found enabled the state to be more proactive than others. California is also a leader in the adoption of grid-enhancing technologies, which enable it to make the most of the existing grid. 

But more work — and in some places much more work — needs to be done. 

“Many regions continue to fall well short of best practices, and progress remains uneven relative to the scale and urgency of today’s transmission needs,” the authors note, adding that the growth of electricity demand means that forward-looking transmission planning is more important than ever. Ultimately, even in the places where transmission planning and development is making strides, it is largely failing to meet the scale that load growth will require. 

Nationwide, interregional planning is a weak link. Coordination between regions remains reactive and unplanned, even though the authors note that investment in interregional transmission — which carries power from one, for example, high-wind rural area to a demand center hundreds of miles away — can deliver huge reliability, affordability, and resilience benefits. ACEG research from June 2025 suggests that interregional lines can deliver $5 in benefits for every dollar invested. 

But actually getting the enormous lines built can take over a decade when you factor in both wrangling with regulators and the legal system, and the actual construction. And even when a project has the approvals it needs, they can become embroiled in politics, as was the case with the Grain Belt Express. In July 2025, on the same day that the Trump administration released an “AI Action Plan” that calls for expanding transmission capacity, it canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee to build the interregional power line, which would deliver 5,000 megawatts of electricity to the Midwest.

It was a major setback for what would be the largest transmission project in the U.S. — though it is still slated to start construction later this year. As Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, said on an August 2024 episode of the Catalyst podcast, federal support is especially meaningful for these interregional projects.

“It is very hard to find state regulators to approve cost recovery for a multi-state line like this,” Gramlich said. “I’ve always thought that DOE should have a big pot of money for interregional transmission, and that should be the main focus of DOE spending across all of its programs.”

For more of Rob Gramlich’s latest thoughts on transmission, listen to his November interview on the Catalyst podcast with Shayle Kann: 

Meanwhile, the Southeast is languishing with a persistent F for its transmission planning efforts. One of the primary reasons is a persistent lack of transparency. Stakeholders in the Southeast struggle to access key information. The Florida Reliability Coordinating Council, for instance, keeps data behind password-protected websites, while Southeastern Regional Transmission Planning often requires nondisclosure agreements to access cost estimates and other planning details. 

Furthermore, the region’s planning tends to be both ad hoc and bottom-up: Individual utilities make investments according to their own needs and without consulting one another, and planning entities “essentially ‘roll up’ the local transmission plans from their member utilities,” the authors write. As a result, the wider needs of the region are being left largely unconsidered.

This is especially alarming given that the Southeast has some of the country’s largest load growth projections over the next five years, and the region is explicitly trying to lure data centers. Georgia Power, for example, said in its 2023 integrated resource plan that “new and expanding economic development projects in Georgia have progressed more rapidly and on a larger scale than in previous years” and therefore the state will need to deploy more renewables, delay coal retirements — and build more transmission.

Ultimately, the report is neglecting to plan for the very load growth it is trying to attract; as a 2025 Brattle Group report notes, “utilities have identified the need for over 80 GW of new power generation, but the regional plan only accounts for 12% of that growth.” Taken together, the reality is that demand is outstripping planning.

Of course, one way to improve things is to make it easier to permit transmission lines, so that getting one built takes less time — and is therefore not as contingent on long-term planning that by definition does not have an up-to-date picture of what is needed in any given year. But permitting reform, especially for transmission, has long been a policy boondoggle in Congress. 

The subject has previously resulted in protracted fights about federal versus state authority, as well as whether the customers that end up paying for the multi-billion-dollar projects are reaping enough benefit. The latest permitting reform effort is currently making its way through the legislature. The SPEED Act passed the House in December with bipartisan support; however, the Senate is currently at an impasse in its own negotiations.

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