"Chicken Little" claims about power outages being caused by the transmission grid being overtaxed do not stand up to scrutiny, says columnist Steve Huntoon.

Massachusetts lawmakers and industry members must double down on efforts to rapidly scale up new renewable technologies to meet the needs of the energy transition, speakers at the Northeast Energy and Commerce Association’s Energy Innovation Forum emphasized.

To ensure a cost-effective energy transition, stakeholders must approach transmission planning holistically and avoid piecemeal investments, panelists argued during the NARUC Annual Meeting.

EIA data on utility capital spending over the past 20 years shows that an increase in distribution and transmission spending outweighed declines in generation spending.

Stakeholders are split on whether FERC should adopt additional changes to its generator interconnection rules, or focus on implementing Order 2023 while letting specific regions go further on their own, according to comments filed after a September technical conference.

In an antitrust lawsuit filed in federal court, Avangrid accused NextEra Energy of conducting an “exclusionary and anticompetitive scheme” to stop a major transmission project connecting New England to Quebec.

Stakeholders want MISO to develop a smaller, congestion-relieving transmission study after this year’s near-term congestion study focused on how best to sequence transmission outages needed for construction of long-range transmission projects.

To move forward in the second Trump administration, both Democrats and Republicans will need to depoliticize the debate around climate and energy issues as they face the impacts of increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather, while meeting growing power demand from artificial intelligence, data centers and new manufacturing.

FERC approved tariff revisions and modifications to the joint operating agreement between MISO and SPP that will enshrine a structural and cost-allocation framework for the five projects in their Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue portfolio.

MISO will take a breather from its long-range transmission planning over 2025 to retool the 20-year future scenarios that are the foundation of the transmission portfolios.