In February, Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG) published the “2025 Transmission Planning and Development Report Card: Assessing Progress and Shortfalls as Demand Accelerates Nationwide.”

Here, in Part One of a two-part energy blog, we look at an overview. We will cover the rest of the report in next week’s energy blog, including the actual grades for the ten regions.

The Report Card provides an updated assessment of U.S. transmission planning and development across ten regions. Overall, it shows incremental improvement in transmission planning across most of the regions, driven largely by reforms to regional planning.

However, 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. Accelerating electricity demand, driven by data centers, manufacturing growth, and electrification, is increasing the importance of forward-looking transmission planning, compressing planning timelines, and raising the stakes for regions that continue to rely on incremental or reactive approaches.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) Order No. 1920, which requires regions to begin adopting long-term planning best practices, helped drive improvements, particularly in regional planning for a few regions, even before full compliance is finalized. At the same time, widespread compliance extensions for Order No. 1920 mean many of the rule’s full benefits may not be realized for years. As a result, current grades should be understood as a snapshot of progress underway rather than an endpoint.

This edition of the Report Card places greater emphasis on interregional transmission planning, reflecting an established body of research demonstrating the significant reliability, affordability, and resilience benefits that interregional investments can deliver. While some interregional transmission planning is being conducted through state coordination and voluntary planning efforts, and some development is advancing by independent/merchant projects, these efforts remain largely voluntary. Across most regions, interregional coordination relies on reliability-focused studies rather than proactive, scenario-based planning with durable selection and cost-allocation frameworks. As a result, interregional transmission remains one of the weakest elements of the national planning landscape, with planned capacity generally falling short of estimated need.

Several regions (California, the Midwest, and the Plains) continue to demonstrate the benefits of proactive, long-term regional planning. Coupled with developments in interregional transmission planning, these regions’ grades continued to improve. For example, the Consolidated Planning Process advanced by the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) in the Plains region, which, once approved by FERC, will be an important and significant reform that merges the region’s planning process, including transmission and generator interconnection planning.

New England and the Mid-Atlantic have both shown meaningful improvement, driven by recent long-term regional planning reforms. The Mid-Atlantic improved its regional planning through Order No. 1920-related long-term planning reforms. Most of New England, New York, and some of the Mid-Atlantic have also increased state engagement on interregional transmission planning through the Northeast States Collaborative on Interregional Transmission.

Many regions, including all of the non-Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) regions, continue to face significant gaps in both regional and interregional planning frameworks. In these regions, transmission development often occurs through individual utility investments or ad hoc coordination, rather than durable, region-scale planning processes, limiting the ability to fully capture system-wide benefits.

That said, in the West, the Northwest and Southwest along with California, are participating in the Western Transmission Expansion Coalition (WestTEC), a voluntary, west-wide transmission planning process that has broad stakeholder participation and is currently one of the best interregional transmission planning practices in the country.