Where's the Transmission?

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently released two Notices of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR), on April 21 and June 16, 2022, on national electricity transmission and related matters. The NOPRs ostensibly deal with the issues that I wrote about in March 2022 regarding the failures of US policy makers to identify the unique geographic problems of what I label “Transmission III.” However, the NOPRs are immensely frustrating documents, both in their form and in their thin—and essentially retrograde—substance in the context of the largest problem facing US electricity transmission today: the failure to define a pathway for speeding the entry of renewable electricity generation on to the larger US transmission grid.