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December 11, 2025

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FERC Focusing on Large Loads, Clearing the Decks Under Rosner

FERC held its monthly open meeting Sept. 18 amid something of an interregnum period as it awaits two nominees to fill empty seats, with Chair David Rosner saying one of his goals during his tenure is to clear out old proceedings.

“We’ve been focused on methodically clearing out longstanding proceedings that, in some cases, have been pending before the commission for years,” Rosner said. “Several of these are on the agenda today.”

One such longstanding item FERC recently terminated was a Notice of Inquiry that Chair Kevin McIntyre launched in 2018 looking into how the commission could update how it approves natural gas infrastructure, Commissioner Lindsay See noted during the open meeting (PL18-1). McIntyre died in office before the proceeding wrapped up, but it was picked up by Chair Richard Glick, who wanted FERC to address greenhouse emissions from gas infrastructure, a policy that sunk his renomination. (See Glick’s FERC Tenure in Peril as Manchin Balks at Renomination Hearing.)

“The draft statement was getting in the way of this goal of regulatory certainty by introducing potential confusion and giving avenues for legal vulnerability,” See said.

FERC issued an order terminating the proceeding on Sept. 12, two weeks after Energy Secretary Chris Wright wrote to the commission asking it to axe the fallow docket.

The commission also moved on more current issues, with Rosner releasing a letter he sent to all six jurisdictional ISOs and RTOs asking them for information on best practices around load forecasting in light of growing demand driven by data centers and other sources.

“At a time when utilities forecast hundreds or thousands of megawatts of growth, improving forecasts by even a few percentage points in the right direction — up or down — can impact billions of dollars in investments and customer bills,” Rosner said in the letter. “Put simply, we cannot efficiently plan the electric generation and transmission needed to serve new customers if we don’t forecast how much energy they will need as accurately as possible.”

Rosner posed several questions in the letter, including asking grid operators how they, regional utilities and state regulators in their territories obtain information that verifies when and whether prospective large loads will reach commercial operations. He also asked how consistently large loads are screened before being included in forecasts.

Another question is how grid operators forecast the actual consumption of large loads compared to their requested level of interconnection service. FERC also asked how the RTOs coordinate with each other and utilities at the regional or interregional levels to share best practices on large load forecasting and ensure requests are not double counted.

Ultimately, the customers creating the load growth are at the retail level, which means they are regulated by states that play key roles in feeding information up to the ISO/RTO forecasts. Rosner said he was interested only in what the organized markets under FERC’s jurisdiction can do.

“I’m very interested in doing things that are purely within their ability to control,” Rosner said. “We’re not asking any state to do anything different. We’re asking the RTOs to say, ‘Hey, what are your best practices,’ just to make sure we’re accurate, because being either high or low means that we’re not planning for an efficient set of infrastructure to meet the challenge.”

While Rosner said he views reliability as FERC’s most important job, he also is focused on enabling economic growth by ensuring abundant supplies of energy.

“I’m really excited about infrastructure,” Rosner said. “I think we need to build, build, build. America needs every electron on every molecule of every type we can get, and we need more infrastructure to move it.”

Reliable and affordable energy is not just a prerequisite for residents and businesses; it is vital to winning the race for artificial intelligence, he said.

When it comes to AI and the related growth in demand from data centers, FERC has had a pending case on issues around co-locating loads at existing power plants since November 2024, when See and former Commissioner (and later Chair) Mark Christie voted against allowing Amazon Web Services to use more of a Talen Energy nuclear plant’s capacity in such a deal. (See FERC Rejects Expansion of Co-located Data Center at Susquehanna Nuclear Plant.)

FERC Commissioner Lindsay See | © RTO Insider

“We also have our open matter when it comes to co-located load,” See said. “I just want to highlight that FERC is not the only player when it comes to the many questions in these areas.”

See said she is excited to see what policies around large loads come out of states and the grid operators but that it is important that FERC deal with those issues before it, and the co-location proceeding can be brought to a close soon.

“This is a top priority,” Rosner said. “It’s also a very complicated topic. My colleagues and I have been working hard on this. I’m really excited about co-location and everything in between, and getting the rules of the road in place so that we can unlock all these new technologies, get them on the grid and get data centers built.”

The co-location proceeding is pending and contested, meaning commissioners are limited in what they can say publicly under ex parte rules, but Rosner said that FERC was working to adjudicate the record and move something forward.

Load growth is very much top of mind for the industry, and Commissioner Judy Chang noted that the new proposals to help manage it are going to be filed with FERC in the near future.

“I anticipate we will receive more filings in these coming months from utilities and RTOs proposing reforms or changes in how they integrate new resources, integrate those resources with load, or how they integrate those resources with their existing or new transmission planning processes, and really how to handle these large loads on the system,” Chang said. “I’m committed to learning more about these large loads so that I can do my job effectively.”

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N.J. Solar Project Developers Scramble, Wonder What Comes Next

As solar development companies race to meet the deadlines by which they can secure federal investment tax credits (ITCs) before the program expires, developers see a better-than-expected short-term outlook but a grim long term.

Developers say guidelines issued by the Trump administration in August open the window to potentially completing more projects than they expected. In particular, the designation of a four-year period for certain residential and commercial projects to be completed if construction starts before July 2026 will enable more projects to obtain the tax credits, developers say. The credits, for 30% of the cost, are considered a major element toward making a solar project economically viable.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, enacted July 4, eliminated the ITC for residential projects that are not in service by Dec. 31. However, guidelines released in mid-August surprised developers by adding some lenience: Commercial projects and some leased residential projects must either be completed by the end of 2027, or, if they begin construction before July 5, 2026, they have four years to be completed.

Fred DeSanti, executive director of the New Jersey Solar Energy Coalition, said the organization was “reasonably pleased” with the guidelines, saying they give developers “some time to continue to get some work done.”

“So we’re under kind of a burning platform to get as many projects going as soon as possible,” he said, adding that utilities will be under “enormous pressure” to meet the demand in connections.

Annika Colston — president of New York City-based AC Power, which has three New Jersey projects in development and is looking for more to complete before the deadline — said recent weeks have “been a bit of a roller coaster.”

The House of Representatives’ version of the bill, which included a tax on the production of solar and wind power that was not passed by the Senate, was “shocking,” she said, but the release of the guidelines meant the “ultimate outcome felt manageable.”

Uncertain Future

But the removal of the tax credit has thrown a cloud of uncertainty over the long-term strength of New Jersey’s now two-decade-old solar sector, raising questions about whether it can even meet the state’s past capacity goals, let alone the far more expansive current predictions of future needs.

The ITC’s demise comes just as state officials are looking to make solar a key element in the effort to boost in-state electricity generation to meet the dramatic surge in demand expected over the next decade, mainly from the development of data centers.

Officials frequently say that solar projects are the quickest new resources able to interconnect and would provide cheap energy for the energy-importing state, especially now that the state’s offshore wind sector is largely dormant. But developers say the economic viability of many projects will be questionable without the ITC. Some developers see potential support from the rising cost of electricity in the region, the state’s vibrant community solar sector, its new storage incentive program and perhaps another, smaller ITC to help buttress the sector. But they don’t see those making up for the loss of the full credit.

DeSanti said its demise will put “a lot of cost pressure” on companies and hurt the large-scale solar sector the most.

“You’re talking about huge investments — tens of millions of dollars,” he said. “Nobody’s going to put that kind of money on the table without some assurances that they’re going to get the 30% ITC.”

Smaller projects “are going to be limping along,” he said. “They’re going to be a lot tighter, and the market’s going to be shrinking from what it is. … I think we’re going to see a lot of the smaller guys go under from the pressure. The bigger companies, the established companies, I think they’ll be OK.”

Ray Cantor, a lobbyist on environmental issues for the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, said that with solar contributing only about 6% of the state’s electricity use, the sector has plenty of room to grow.

But “while it is part of energy future, it’s not the answer to our long-term capacity needs,” he said. “Solar is part of the solution. It is not the way to get out of our deficit of capacity.”

Colston said she still is optimistic that New Jersey’s established solar sector will help it fare better than states with a shorter history to fall back on, and hopes the four-year completion deadline will give federal legislators time to plan for a new tax credit. She noted that the ITC, which has existed in different forms for more than two decades, had been 20% at one point.

“Projects are viable at a lower ITC, assuming we don’t have outrageous tariffs,” said Colston, whose company develops solar on landfills. “There needs to be some relief somewhere.”

Community Solar Boost

The turbulence comes as New Jersey is far from achieving Gov. Phil Murphy’s goal of having 12.2 GW of solar by 2030 and 32 GW by 2050.

As of July, the state had an installed capacity of 5.2 GW, according to the latest figures from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. About 80% is behind the meter, 3.5% is community solar and 16% is utility-scale, but those proportions are changing. Community solar accounts for about 53% of the development pipeline, and 30% is grid supply.

State officials see community solar as a key element of the state’s future generation, and Murphy provided a boost on Aug. 22 by signing a law authorizing the BPU to allocate 3,000 MW of capacity by 2029, or whenever the limit is reached. The state currently allocates 150 MW a year, although a one-time measure increased it to 250 MW in 2025.

Strong demand for community solar allocation in two pilot solicitations and three in the permanent program have produced 119 completed projects and another 435 in the pipeline, BPU figures show. The agency in April said the state’s four utilities reported they had received 1,120 community solar interconnection applications totaling about 1,800 MW of power.

A solar project developed by AC Power on a landfill in Delanco, N.J. | AC Power

Some developers also hope a new law facilitating the development of storage will help meet the electricity demand surge while supporting the solar sector. The law, also signed by Murphy in August, aims to stimulate the development of “transmission-scale energy storage systems,” defined as those with a capacity of at least 5 MW that are connected to PJM. (See N.J. Boosts Storage, Community Solar Program Capacity.)

Some storage projects also retain the federal tax credit. DeSanti said the storage incentives could help make solar more attractive and cushion the blow from the ITC’s disappearance.

“It gives you another source of revenue,” he said. “Because if your battery is charged under the program, if the utility needs power, you can actually sell the power out of the battery.”

The state’s rising electricity rates also could support solar. The average electricity bill rose by 20% on June 1, driven in large part by record-high PJM capacity auction prices in July 2024, which the RTO says were pushed up by forecasts showing that future demand will far exceed the expected supply. Analysts expect auction prices, along with rates, to continue to rise.

“There’s no end in sight for the price of energy going up,” DeSanti said. “As that occurs, it’s going to push more and more people to say, ‘I’ve got to get out from under these utility bills.’ Once you get a deal on solar, you’re basically insulating yourself from those increases completely.”

Accelerating Solar Submissions

For developers, those benefits are distant and uncertain, and their task at hand is to get as many projects planned, and applications submitted, before the credits expire.

Sawyer Morgan, a project manager in the BPU’s clean energy division, said the agency has seen an “acceleration in the number of applications.”

“We currently have 1.4 GW of projects in the pipeline and expect many more projects to join, even in the next year or so, that will be able to qualify for the federal tax credits,” he said.

“Given that most projects in New Jersey are relatively small, we’re hopeful that a lot of projects will be able to meet these milestones and still qualify for the ITC,” he added. “As more homeowners are aware that the residential tax credit ends at the end of the current year, there’s going to be a ton of interest for the residential direct-owned projects to complete construction as soon as possible.”

Still, agency staff are “very concerned that after the expiration of the ITC, there will be a slowdown in the solar industry,” driven in part by developers who “pull forward” projects to get them inside the deadline, he said.

“There’s certainly likely to be a slowdown in installations,” which the BPU is looking to counter, he said. “We anticipate looking at reviewing programs to see what the appropriate mechanisms will be that help drive down costs through streamlining interconnection and other requirements, other costs that are involved in this other installation process or looking at the incentives that the board provides.”

Brian O. Lipman, executive director for the New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel, said that while solar has a “significant role” in the state’s future energy portfolio, it should “no longer plan an active role in incentivizing solar.”

“The solar market has matured greatly,” he said. “New Jersey ratepayers already pay more than those in any other state for solar subsidies. We no longer need, nor can our electric ratepayers afford to pay, such high subsidies that directly impact residential and business electric bills. Even with the loss of federal subsidies, solar in New Jersey should be able to stand on its own.”

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MISO Board Orders More Detail into Monitor’s 2026 Budget

DETROIT — MISO’s Board of Directors has asked the RTO’s Independent Market Monitor to better explain its $10.6 million 2026 budget before it agrees to the amount.

During Board Week, members of the board’s Markets Committee said they wanted greater detail on a $5.9 million budget item the Monitor proposed for “base monitoring and data management tasks.”

Monitor David Patton said “base monitoring” includes screening MISO market activity, data management, reviewing market outcomes and operations, producing reports, and coordination with the RTO. However, he did not allocate specific costs for each of the responsibilities.

Patton said the tasks take up a large share of the monitoring budget because that is his primary responsibility.

Director Robert Lurie said he would not accept a similar level of vagueness in MISO’s proposed budgets. Director Theresa Wise similarly asked for more “visibility” into the budget.

Director H.B. “Trip” Doggett encouraged Patton to “polish it up” and bring the budget back to a nonpublic meeting with the board in October. The board and the Monitor then could present the final product during the next Board Week in December.

Wisconsin Public Service Commissioner Marcus Hawkins said he had “concerns with the timing of the additional scrutiny” into the Monitor’s budget. He said that while he supported efforts into transparency, this year’s heightened examination appeared suspicious because of the recent controversy surrounding the Monitor assessing MISO’s transmission planning. (See FERC Sides with Market Monitor over MISO in Compensation Dispute and MISO IMM Contends he Should Have Role in Tx Planning Oversight.)

Hawkins said the IMM’s budget increase in 2026 appears lower than the national rate of inflation. He asked board members to share the results of their nonpublic meeting in October at the next Board Week in early December.

Over 2024, the Monitor operated with a nearly $10.2 million budget.

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MISO Recounts Tough Summer; Monitor Praises Lack of Emergencies

DETROIT — MISO said the summer of 2025 was the most demanding since 2012, though the RTO steered the grid with only a single maximum generation event.

“This summer was one of the most challenging in a decade,” Executive Director of System Operations Jessica Lucas told the Markets Committee of the MISO Board of Directors on Sept. 16.

Lucas said heat and humidity across the footprint were consistently high and that load exceeded 100 GW or higher for more than 750 hours over the summer, a number not seen since 2012 and nearly triple that of 2024.

The summer heat triggered more than 40 Energy Emergency Alerts across the Eastern Interconnection, but in MISO, “we only had one escalation” to an emergency, Lucas said.

MISO experienced a “sharp increase in outages” over the summer, Lucas said. The RTO reported 46 GW in average daily generation outages, compared to summer 2024’s 31-GW average, culminating in a 48% increase year over year. Lucas said members reported “equipment failure” as the leading cause of outages.

“It’s perhaps too early to call this a trend, but it’s an important data point to monitor to see if this extends into the fall,” Lucas said.

At a MISO board meeting Sept. 18, CEO John Bear said summer 2025 was “exceptionally demanding” and “signals a new normal for grid stress.”

The RTO encountered two rough patches in late June and again in late July. Lucas said that from June 21 to 24, the footprint contended with high demand, low wind output and high outages, leading to a maximum generation emergency on June 23. (See MISO Declares Max Gen Emergency in Heat Wave.)

Independent Market Monitor David Patton said he was impressed MISO avoided an emergency declaration on June 24 when virtually every other control area entered emergency procedures.

“What we saw this summer actually bears out what I’ve been saying: that ‘MISO is the most reliable RTO’ — at least among the ones that we monitor,” Patton said and again criticized NERC’s “high-risk” rating for the RTO.

MISO logged its almost 122-GW summer peak in late July. It also issued several capacity advisories for its South region throughout the season. (See MISO on Track to Wrap Summer with 122-GW Peak, Addresses Frequent South Advisories.)

The RTO kept up a near-daily cadence of capacity advisories for MISO South into September. The grid operator repeatedly said either forced outages, limited transfer capability or a combination of both were the culprits.

“You might have noticed we’ve been leveraging our capacity advisories more frequently,” Lucas said.

Stakeholders can construe the repeat advisories as an “indicator” of heightened reliability risks in MISO South, she said, but the RTO wants to communicate “so it doesn’t feel like anyone is caught by surprise” if it needs to institute emergency actions to deal with transmission or capacity issues.

Lucas also said MISO is developing a “set of criteria or methodology to step out of emergency declarations.” She said determining when gird conditions no longer require emergency actions and terminating declarations is a complicated decision that has operating ramifications.

The MISO IMM’s depiction of the 500-kV transmission outage July 28-29 | Potomac Economics

Amid the late July heat wave, MISO reported it unexpectedly lost a 500-kV line in MISO South on July 28-29, leading it to order a local transmission emergency and 780 MW of long-lead load-modifying resources to dial back demand.

Data from Yes Energy show Entergy Arkansas’ 500-kV Keo-West Memphis transmission line from Little Rock, Ark., to Memphis, Tenn., was offline July 28-29.

Lucas said MISO issued six declarations July 29 to manage the situation.

Patton said MISO’s LMR use means it is learning to use demand response to manage transmission emergencies in addition to capacity emergencies. He also said MISO incurred only about $8 million in uplift charges over the summer because of sharper resource commitments and operating decisions.

“That’s like nothing,” Patton said. “My guess is that PJM is going to be in the hundreds of millions. …This pattern is really impressive.”

Finally, MISO set an all-time solar peak of 14.1 GW on Aug. 3. The new record was double the solar output MISO achieved in summer 2024.

Patton said the larger solar fleet has brought ramping challenges that are growing with the solar fleet. He said cumulative evening net load ramp demand “has grown sharply” from about 1 GW in 2023 to nearly 6 GW in 2025 and asked MISO to continue to keep an eye on its increasing requirements. Evening ramping needs also occur later on summer nights, Patton said, with the largest need moving from 4 p.m. ET to 6 p.m. because of solar tapering down.

RTO Insider is a wholly owned subsidiary of Yes Energy.

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Monroe’s Western Outreach Pays Dividends for SPP

PORTLAND, Ore. — When former SPP COO Carl Monroe hands out his business card these days, it reads, “Carl Monroe, Principal, Munro Advisors.”

“Munro?” Is that a misspelling?

“It’s the traditional way of spelling Monroe. They were Irish,” Monroe says of his ancestors. “‘Munro’ means they’re from the River Roe in Northern Ireland.”

The Munros were also “tenacious fighters” during the 1400s and into the 1600s, centuries punctuated by the Hundred Years’ War, King Henry VIII’s reign, the English Civil War and the beginning of the Jacobite Risings.

“They fought so ferociously that the Scots hired them as mercenaries to fight all the Scottish clans,” Monroe says. “Eventually, they got enough esteem that they are one of the clans that are considered [part of] Scotland, or Scotch-Irish.”

The Munros were so highly respected that the Scots gifted them land for their own castle, Monroe says.

When the story is related to an SPP stakeholder, who had just greeted Monroe on the sidelines of an industry conference, he says, “Had I known that he was so lethal, I would have given him a wider berth.”

Of course, unlike his ancestors, Monroe is anything but “lethal.”

A veteran of more than 45 years in the industry that first included stints with Ameren and Entergy, Monroe spent 15 of his final 22 years with SPP as its COO. That made him responsible for grid operations across the RTO’s 14-state balancing authority area, a footprint that grew from eight states during his tenure with the addition of Nebraska’s public power entities and the Integrated System in the Dakotas.

Independent transmission developer Grid United, for whom Monroe now serves as one of three members of its Advisory Board, credits him for being “instrumental” in expanding SPP’s footprint by 20% and adding $1.5 billion of transactions in the real-time energy market.

“Carl has helped to shepherd us through tremendous change and growth. We just wouldn’t be where we are today without his leadership,” SPP CEO Nick Brown said when Monroe announced his retirement in 2019. (See SPP COO Monroe to Retire in Early 2020.)

The footprint is expanding once again. The RTO’s expansion into the Western Interconnection will be live in April 2026. In 2027, SPP Markets+, a day-ahead service offering that includes real-time commitment and dispatch, will begin operations. It will replace the grid operator’s Western Energy Imbalance Service market, which it has administered on a contract basis since 2021.

SPP has also been serving as a reliability coordinator for primarily future Markets+ participants since 2019, and it was chosen by CAISO and five utilities nearly 10 years ago to administer the Western Interconnection Unscheduled Flow Mitigation Plan, which manages the use of certain controllable devices to mitigate congestion along transmission lines. The RTO was also selected as the program operator for the Western Power Pool’s six-year-old Western Resource Adequacy Program (WRAP).

Much of that is credited toward the “instrumental” Monroe and his outreach for more than a decade to Western Interconnection entities. He led SPP’s effort to add the Mountain West Transmission Group, a Front Range initiative that fell apart after Xcel Energy subsidiary Public Service Company of Colorado pulled out and led to a broader Western Market Exploratory Group that studied the benefits of a regional market. Years later, PSCo is one of seven entities joining Markets+ after Colorado regulators ordered the state’s utilities to join regional markets.

Jack Moore, an SPP IT engineer involved in the Markets+ development effort, spoke recently during a stakeholder meeting here. He prefaced his comments by remembering his first visit to Portland in 2010, when he accompanied Monroe to talk with the Bonneville Power Administration about “an energy market in the West.”

“So, 15 years later, here we are,” Moore said.

“That was one of the things Carl was always doing, just seeing whether there was a way that SPP could meet potential stakeholder needs,” said Jim Gonzalez, SPP’s director of seams and Western services. “As we hear opportunities for help, facilitating and collaborating, that’s one of the things SPP has always really been open to. If we have neighbors and there seem to be needs, can we help meet those needs?”

“That’s a lot of it,” Monroe says by way of agreement. He described a “paradigm shift” that has taken place with wholesale markets and the West’s growing understanding of their benefits.

“That’s why you’re seeing a lot of the development of markets out there. I think you’re starting to see that paradigm shift about having a real real-time [market] and a wholesale market that actually provides more benefits to them than trying to hold onto control of those things,” he says.

“It really gives them a way to mitigate some of the risks. … That’s why you see a whole lot of interest, but there’s some underpinnings that at least we stumbled through in the East,” Monroe adds, listing tariffs, balancing authorities, resource adequacy and “those types of things” that grid operators do. “It just means that a group of utilities can decide how to do those things together in a way that provides a benefit to the whole that is greater than the benefit each of them can provide individually.”

As an example, he points to the WRAP and utilities that got together “with SPP’s help” to understand how they could work together in a resource adequacy program.

“I was an adviser for some of that too,” he says. “Together, they could rely on each other’s resource adequacy more and ensuring that each party was upholding their portion that they had to rely on.”

“In nearly 15 years as a director at SPP, I’ve met no one with greater knowledge of markets and operations or with such ability to collaboratively address complex issues,” SPP Board of Directors Chair Larry Altenbaumer said of Monroe when he announced his retirement.

His decision just happened to coincide with the COVID-19 pandemic, making him something of a forgotten figure. He was asked what he intended to do with his spare time and whether he would go into consulting.

“I didn’t know the difference between retirement or COVID. Everybody just went home to work,” he says. “I spent some time with SPP near the end working with the West trying to help them out, first of all, just to understand what it means to work together and what benefits you get out of it, [and] beyond that, what SPP could do for them. Of course, you’re seeing some of that play out today.”

SPP gave him a contract to “do one little thing,” but when he was finished with the project, he was free to work with others. With his somewhat eponymous consulting firm, Monroe helps clients with bulk power system operations, reliability standards, wholesale energy markets, strategic planning, FERC tariffs and other issues.

“I don’t want to do things that are not interesting to me, but this industry is really interesting,” he says. “The transition that it’s going through … it’s just been fascinating to watch the industry and what the industry needs to do, but at the same time, how it’s needed within the country and what reliability means to the country itself as critical infrastructure. …

“There are things I know that I can help people with,” Monroe adds. “There were a few people that called and wanted some help and just understand SPP and our wholesale markets and stuff like that. So that’s been a lot of fun.”

Besides his work with Grid United and its HVDC projects, Monroe also has consulted with solar and hybrid storage in both interconnections.

“Some are looking at markets, and some are looking at coordinating their activities together with others for optimized operations,” he says. “But the most interesting thing, [which] gets me my 49th state to do work in, is an RTO for Alaska.”

Monroe graduated from Auburn University with a degree in electrical engineering. While at SPP, he decorated his office with a black-and-white photo from his time on The Plains. The image shows Elvis Presley’s 1974 performance on campus at the Memorial Coliseum. Monroe would direct visitors to the AV booth in the background, from where he was responsible for lighting The King.

He joined SPP from Entergy, originally being hired to manage the RTO’s growing IT department. He was elected as an officer and promoted to executive vice president and COO in 2004, where he oversaw operations, the power system’s long-term forecasting and planning, and interregional coordination.

“I believe his personal efforts, contributions and leadership were critical to the tremendous development and success of the Southwest Power Pool,” said longtime member Mike Wise, with Golden Spread Electric Cooperative.

“I’ll do what I can to help people,” Monroe says. “If I can’t help you, I’ll tell you I can’t help you. That’s fine. I’m enjoying what I do, whether I do anything or not.”

Nothing to do? Given Monroe’s history, that’s a little hard to believe.

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Renewables Creating Opportunities for Pumped Hydro in New England

As decarbonization policy and the growth of intermittent renewable power in New England drives increasing needs for clean balancing resources, a developer in Maine is evaluating whether pumped storage hydropower — one of the oldest generation technologies still used in the region — could play an increased role in the grid of the future.

The history of pumped storage dates back about 100 years in New England. The Rocky River facility, which remains in operation today in western Connecticut, was the first of its kind in the U.S. when it came online in 1929. It was built to help balance the variable production profile of run-of-river hydropower.

The facility is based on a simple concept: During periods of low-cost power, two 3.5-MW reversible pump turbines push water from the river to a large reservoir at a higher elevation. When power demand peaks, water flows downhill to produce power through the two turbines and a larger conventional generator.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the proliferation of nuclear power in New England spurred the development of two significantly larger pumped storage facilities in Western Massachusetts.

Northfield Mountain, which has 1,168 MW of qualified capacity with ISO-NE, and the Bear Swamp Generating Station, which has 662 MW of capacity, were built by utilities to help match the production profile of the nuclear resources with demand, allowing the nuclear plants to stay online at a constant level. The pumped storage facilities charged during low-demand periods at night and discharged during peak load periods in the day.

The facilities are open-loop systems, pumping water from rivers to elevated reservoirs. They use large reversible pump turbines that are about 30% less efficient when pumping water uphill than when generating.

In the 50 years since the two plants came online, all but two nuclear plants in New England have been decommissioned, but Northfield Mountain and Bear Swamp remain in service.

“The economics of the projects really haven’t changed. You’re still looking for that price arbitrage: We’re going to try to pump when prices are low, and we’re going to turn around and generate when prices are higher,” said Justin Trudell, CEO of FirstLight Power, which owns and operates the Rocky River and Northfield Mountain facilities. Trudell previously worked at Brookfield Renewable, which co-owns Bear Swamp.

To recover the costs of pumping water, “you’ve got to at least make up that 30-ish-percent loss of efficiency in that price arbitrage; that would set your baseline,” Trudell said.

He added that, over the past decade, the steady increase of solar generation has caused the typical temporal pattern of pumping and discharging to shift.

“On sunny days, especially in the summer, we’re seeing deep troughs in pricing midday when you have this glut of solar online,” Trudell said. “We’re seeing a lot more opportunities now where we’re actually pumping during the day, and we’re generally generating during the evening peak.”

Growing behind-the-meter solar generation has contributed to an increasing difference between midday and evening demand. The RTO recorded a record-low demand around 2 p.m. on Easter Sunday in April, and about two months later, it recorded its highest load in over a decade around 7 p.m. on June 24. (See Growth of BTM Solar Drives Record-low Demand in ISO-NE and Extreme Heat Triggers Capacity Deficiency in New England.)

New Development Possibilities

With the growth of intermittent renewables poised to continue in New England because of clean energy policies, increasing power demand and the challenges of fossil development in the region, states are looking to procure significant amounts of new storage capacity.

Connecticut has set a goal of deploying 1,000 MW of storage by 2030, while Massachusetts in 2024 passed legislation aiming to procure 5,000 MW of energy storage by mid-2030, broken into mid-duration, long-duration and multiday categories.

Western Maine Energy Storage, a company backed by construction corporation Cianbro, is investigating whether new pumped storage facilities could help meet this storage need, and in July it submitted a preliminary permit application for a 400- to 500-MW project in Dixfield (P-15410).

The proposed reservoir system effectively would function as a closed-loop system, featuring two 100-acre reservoirs at different elevations.

The upper reservoir of the Northfield Mountain pumped storage facility | FirstLight

This design may help the project avoid some of the environmental challenges associated with open-loop pumped storage facilities connected to river systems. Northfield Mountain and Bear Swamp are involved in extended relicensing proceedings with FERC and have drawn criticism and opposition from environmental groups over impacts on downstream ecosystems.

Western Maine spokesperson Tom Brennan said the project is enhanced by the increasing arbitrage opportunities brought by renewable production in the region. He highlighted Maine’s goal of achieving 100% clean power by 2040.

“If we’re going to do that, we’re going to need storage,” Brennan said.

He said the company has been evaluating potential sites for a pumped storage project “for many years,” adding that “Maine is, in many ways, ideal because of the topography variation.”

“It’s because of that topographic variation and access to a significant and appropriate transmission line that has us focused in on Dixfield,” he said.

Unique Characteristics

Compared to lithium-ion batteries, pumped storage resources typically have a longer duration, though they rarely discharge to the point of depletion. Northfield Mountain has a duration of nearly eight hours, while Bear Swamp has a duration of about 4.5 hours.

Both facilities also tout their ability to ramp up from no output to full output within about 10 minutes.

“We’re faster[-ramping] than gas, and we’re longer-duration than most batteries,” FirstLight’s Trudell said. “We’re in this sweet spot of being able to provide more of a service for a longer period of time than some of these other technologies.”

Trudell said Northfield Mountain relies primarily on revenues from the ISO-NE wholesale markets and often is held in reserve by the RTO as a first contingency. He emphasized the reliability benefits of the facility’s ability to quickly ramp up or down as needed.

As ISO-NE works to overhaul its methodology for accrediting resources in its capacity market, storage owners have pushed for the RTO to account for ramp-up time in its accreditation methodology, and the storage industry is closely following the accreditation project to see how the changes could affect future capacity market revenues. (See ISO-NE Kicks off Talks on Accreditation, Seasonal Capacity Changes.)

State revenues generally are not a major revenue source for existing pumped storage resources; while Massachusetts’ Clean Peak Energy Standard does not exclude pumped storage resources from generating Clean Peak Energy Certificates, resources that came online prior to 2019 are not eligible. Bear Swamp, which underwent an upgrade after this deadline, has qualified about 88 MW of its capacity in the program.

In July, Massachusetts issued a procurement of 1,500 MW of mid-duration storage, seeking to buy environmental attributes including Clean Peak certificates. (See Massachusetts Seeks 1,500 MW of Mid-duration Energy Storage.) Bear Swamp bid its full 88 MW of Clean Peak-qualified capacity for the procurement on Sept. 10.

‘Who’s Going to Buy the Power?’

By nature, pumped storage projects are capital intensive, and any new facility likely would need a significant amount of revenue certainty for investors to commit to a project.

“The question is offtake, and you’ve got to get offtake before you get financing,” Trudell said. “We know how to license, from the federal side, a new pumped storage project. The problem is: Who’s going to buy the power?”

Connor Nelson, manager of regulatory affairs and markets at the National Hydropower Association, noted there has been no new pumped storage built in the U.S. in about 30 years, in part because of these barriers.

1980 illustration of the Rocky River pumped storage system | The American Society of Mechanical Engineers

“What you have is a long-lead-time, capital-intensive resource,” Nelson said. “You need patient capital, patient investment, and you need, in a lot of cases, some sort of long-term capacity contract or a strong market signal that can assure developers and investors that this is going to be worth it in the long run.”

However, he stressed that there is an “ever increasing need for long-duration energy storage” and that the “prospects for pumped hydro are as good as they’ve ever been, in part because there’s a lot of good federal incentives right now.”

He noted that the recent federal reconciliation bill did not strip incentives for pumped storage resources, and developers that begin construction by 2033 could get “upwards of 30% of that investment back in the form of a tax credit or direct pay if you’re a utility.”

Western Maine’s Brennan declined to comment on the type of contracts or revenue certainty the company would need to move forward on the Dixfield project.

“We are so early in the process,” Brennan said. “I am very short on details at this point; the design details will be in the works for some time to come.”

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NERC Committee Approves Waivers for IBR Standards Projects

Members of NERC’s Standards Committee approved a set of waivers that could see comment and ballot rounds for several high-priority standards projects reduced to as few as five days during their quarterly in-person meeting, held at Duke Energy headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., on Sept. 17.

The waivers apply to Project 2020-06 (Verifications of models and data for generators), Project 2021-01 (System model validation with inverter-based resources) and Project 2022-02 (Uniform modeling framework for IBRs). All three projects relate to Milestone 3 of FERC Order 901, which directed NERC to develop requirements for modeling of inverter-based resources and submit them to the commission by Nov. 4. (See FERC Orders Reliability Rules for Inverter-Based Resources.)

In light of this tight schedule, the committee already agreed at its April meeting to shorten the initial comment and ballot periods for the projects from the customary 45 calendar days to as few as 25, and to shorten their final ballot periods from 10 to five days. (See NERC Standards Committee Approves IBR Posting.) All three projects conducted their initial ballot periods earlier in 2025, but none reached the required threshold for approval.

Committee Chair Todd Bennett, of Associated Electric Cooperative Inc., reminded members that the waiver request was meant to give the standard drafting team the “flexibility” to reduce the ballot time, acknowledging that the committee had “begun to use waivers a bit more often” in recent years to deal with the growing number of high-priority work items. While attendees generally were supportive of the option, several raised concerns that their implementation could cause problems.

“The concern for some people with a five-day comment period is that you’re almost guaranteed to include a weekend in there, which takes that five days down to three,” said Keith Jonassen of ISO-NE. “The only thing I would want to see is [the projects not] be posted on a Thursday or Friday to encompass that weekend.”

NERC Director of Standards Development Jamie Calderon said the ERO was aware of this possibility and is actively looking for posting dates for the affected projects that would start early in the week. While nothing has been decided yet, she said the next comment period could begin Sept. 22.

Similarly, Maggy Powell of Amazon Web Services warned NERC that extra effort may be needed to make sure stakeholders are aware of the limited time to weigh in on the standards.

“When you shorten it, you do run the risk of it failing, because if people don’t have the time to review it, they vote ‘no,’ or it just gets missed,” Powell said. “So I guess my suggestion is to really drive all the communication as much as possible … so that people have a chance of being aware when it’s coming.”

Calderon acknowledged Powell’s recommendation and said NERC will remind potential voters to take part in the ballot round.

Additional Standards Actions

Members acted on another high-priority item at the meeting, voting to authorize modifying the recently approved standards on internal network security monitoring (INSM) at certain grid-connected cyber systems as directed by FERC.

The commission approved CIP-015-1 (Cybersecurity – INSM) on June 26; the standard requires utilities to implement INSM for all high-impact grid-connected cyber systems with or without external routable connectivity (ERC), as well as medium-impact systems with ERC. FERC also directed NERC to make further changes, due in September 2026, that would extend the implementation of INSM to electronic access control or monitoring systems and physical access control systems outside the electronic borders around their internal networks.

The committee’s authorization follows its acceptance of a standard authorization request and approval of a drafting team for the project, and a 30-day informal comment period for the SAR.

Also approved at the meeting was a 45-day formal comment and ballot period for proposed standard FAC-002-5 (Facility interconnection studies). (See page 46 of the committee’s meeting agenda.) The new standard would “require [transmission planners] and [planning coordinators] to collect electromagnetic transient (EMT) models from applicable entities and conduct EMT studies where necessary, ensure accurate models are provided and verified prior to commercial operation, and clarify requirements on applicable entities providing accurate models.”

One of the final standards items on the agenda saw the committee appoint seven members, including the chair and vice chair, to the drafting team for Project 2025-01 (Canadian-specific revisions to EOP-012-3), which is intended to address potential compliance difficulties that NERC’s cold weather standard could have for Canadian entities.

Members also agreed to authorize posting for a 45-day comment and ballot period a new standard that would require industry to perform energy reliability assessments for the near and long terms. The standard is unnamed; NERC Manager of Standards Development Alison Oswald told attendees the drafting team felt its subject matter could warrant creating “a new family of standards” on which stakeholders will be asked their opinions during the comment period.

Chair, Vice Chair and Member Elections

Committee members approved AECI’s Bennett for another two-year term as chair, with current Vice Chair Troy Brumfield, of American Transmission Co., also retaining his seat for another two years. Their next terms will run from Jan. 1, 2026, through Dec. 31, 2027.

Members were reminded of the upcoming elections for committee membership that will run Oct. 22-31. Members serve staggered two-year terms beginning Jan. 1 of each year; those whose terms will expire Dec. 31 are:

    • Segment 2: RTOs and ISOs — Jamie Johnson, CAISO
    • Segment 3: Load-serving entities — Claudine Fritz, Exelon
    • Segment 4: Transmission-dependent utilities — Marty Hostler, Northern California Power Agency
    • Segment 5: Electric generators — Terri Pyle, Oklahoma Gas & Electric
    • Segment 6: Electricity brokers, aggregators and marketers — Richard Vendetti, NextEra Energy
    • Segment 7: Large electricity end users — AWS’ Powell
    • Segment 8: Small electricity users — Robert Blohm, Keen Resources
    • Segment 9: Federal, state and provincial regulatory or other government entities — Paul MacDonald, New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board
    • Segment 10: Regional entities — Dave Krueger, SERC Reliability

All of the currently serving members are eligible for re-election; in addition, stakeholders may nominate additional candidates from Sept. 22 to Oct. 13.

Along with those whose terms are expiring, Segment 1 (Transmission owners) is vacant, and Segment 5 will hold a special election to replace Josh Hale of Southern Power, who has moved to another role within the utility. He resigned from the committee at the end of the meeting.

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CISA Lays out Plans for Key Cyber Info Program

The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released its vision for the future of the 26-year-old Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Program, pledging financial support and stability for the framework as it transitions from a “growth” to a “quality” focus. 

Begun in 1999 as a research project at MITRE, the CVE Program has been sponsored by DHS since 2003 and by CISA since the agency’s establishment in 2018. Users have access to “a common lexicon of real, exploitable vulnerabilities,” CISA Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity Nick Andersen said in a blog post. Since its inception, the program has enrolled more than 460 partners across 40 countries. 

The period until now represents the program’s “growth” era, CISA staff said in the CVE Quality for a Cyber Secure Future document, released Sept. 10. The document’s authors called the program “one of the world’s most enduring and trusted cybersecurity public goods” that “has contributed to exponential growth in the cybersecurity community’s capacity to identify, define and catalog hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities.” 

“If you’re a cybersecurity practitioner, you already rely on the CVE Program — whether you realize it or not,” Andersen said.

However, the future of the program was called into question earlier in 2025 when MITRE reportedly informed program managers that the federal government’s contract for the corporation to maintain the CVE program had been cut and the program would have to shut down by April 16.  

Matt Hartman, CISA’s then-acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a release that the problem was “a contract administration issue” and that CISA had stepped in to resolve the issue before the contract lapse. But Andersen acknowledged in his Sept. 10 post that “significant debate” about the program’s future had occurred in recent months amid reporting that federal funding for the program was in jeopardy. 

Andersen laid claim for CISA to “the mandate, mission and momentum to lead [the CVE Program] into the future,” saying the agency’s accountability to the American people made it a crucial independent voice in the program’s decision-making. CISA staff echoed this argument in their document, saying that alternate arrangements like privatization had been considered but found wanting. 

“Privatizing the CVE Program would dilute its value as a public good,” CISA staff wrote. “The incentive structure in the software industry creates tension for private industry, who often face a difficult choice: promote transparency to downstream users through vulnerability disclosure or minimize the disclosure of vulnerabilities to avoid potential economic or reputational harm. These built-in conflicts could have a detrimental impact on program transparency.” 

The authors also said alternate stewardship models might lack stability, leaving the program open to “undue financial pressures or contribution-driven influence.” As a result, they said CISA needs to take a more active role in the management of the CVE Program. 

Staff identified several areas in addition to funding through which CISA can support the program. The first is for the agency to use its connections with its international counterparts, academic institutions, security researchers, operational technology developers and operators, and others to grant them more representation in the program that can “yield valuable insights and innovations.”  

CISA also will support infrastructure modernization and the implementation of services including automation to improve services, while incorporating community feedback into road map decisions to expand transparency and communication. Data quality is another area for investment, with plans “to find creative ways to achieve quality, improve the CVE schema and forge ahead with innovative solutions,” the authors wrote. 

“CISA is reaffirming our leadership role and seizing the opportunity to modernize the CVE Program, solidifying it as the cornerstone of global cybersecurity defense,” Andersen said. “In collaboration with the global cybersecurity community, CISA is committed to delivering a well-governed, trusted and responsive CVE Program aimed to enhance the quality of vulnerability data and global cybersecurity resilience.” 

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MISO Interconnection Queue Drops to 215 GW on Tax Incentive Phaseout

DETROIT — MISO’s generator interconnection queue has fallen to 215 GW as developers cut back on projects in response to the federal phaseout of renewable energy tax incentives, RTO leadership said Sept. 16 during Board Week.

The queue currently contains 1,127 projects at 215 GW. That’s down from more than 300 GW earlier in 2025.

“We’re starting to see significant withdrawals,” MISO Vice President of System Planning Aubrey Johnson told the System Planning Committee of the Board of Directors.

Johnson said projects that entered the queue in 2023 would be hard-pressed to be online in time to meet a 2028 phaseout of federal tax incentives. He said developers are making decisions to trim projects based on the changing economics.

MISO’s tariff expects that generation projects can scale the regular interconnection queue within 373 days; however, the actual average timeline is 1,511 days. The RTO is working to get to a 365-day completion rate with the help of automated studies from tech startup company Pearl Street Technologies. (See MISO: New Software Effective, Faster than Previous Queue Study Process.)

Johnson said resource changes are showing up in the next set of members’ integrated resource plans. Currently, MISO’s 2023 cycle is down to 102 GW from the 123 GW of projects that entered.

“We expect to see significantly more withdrawals in the 2023 cycle,” Johnson said.

Meanwhile, 75 GW are all that remains of MISO’s jumbo, 171-GW 2022 cycle, and 38 GW still are standing from MISO’s 77-GW 2021 cycle.

MISO said it processed 100 generator interconnection agreements totaling 17 GW from November 2024 to August 2025. Historically, only about 20% of generation proposals ever make it to interconnection agreements. The RTO expects to add 10.9 GW in nameplate capacity (6.2 GW on an accredited basis) over the rest of 2025.

Johnson said the clampdown on MISO’s penalty-free withdrawals for projects in the queue also could play a supporting role in the project drop-offs.

Executive Director of Transmission Planning Laura Rauch said that although MISO members are tweaking the near-term resource plans they previously communicated, their emissions targets and renewable energy goals remain unchanged in the long term. She said there’s an “acceptance that it will take longer to get to the endpoint, but no changes in those endpoints as of yet.”

Finally, Johnson said the first 10 generation projects MISO selected for its first interconnection queue fast lane all seem viable, and MISO would begin official studies within days. Half of the first class admitted into MISO’s interconnection queue fast lane are natural gas units and account for 4.3 of the 5.3-GW lot. (See MISO Selects 10 Gen Proposals at 5.3 GW in 1st Expedited Queue Class.)

“We showed only one constraint, and the network upgrades look like they’re going to be in the couple hundred-thousand-dollar range,” Johnson said of transmission needed to accommodate the new generation. He credited MISO’s previous long-range transmission planning for making expedited generator interconnections possible.

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MISO Kicks off South’s Long-range Tx Plan with More Restrained Approach

DETROIT — MISO will start evaluating its South region for long-term transmission needs in 2026, beginning with Louisiana and possibly a lighter touch than used in the Midwest, the RTO announced before its Board of Directors on Sept. 16.

RTO planners told the board’s System Planning Committee they will approach the South with a “collaborative, investigative approach” and an eye on reliability and load growth.

MISO South never has had a successful, regionally cost-shared transmission project. MISO’s approximately $32 billion of long-range transmission projects approved over two portfolios in 2022 and 2024 have been confined to its Midwest region.

“We strongly suspect that while MISO South long-range planning will rely on the same tariff framework, it will have different viewpoints and different requirements,” Executive Director of Transmission Planning Laura Rauch told the committee.

MISO plans to start with modeling and what it calls the “South Load Pocket Risk Assessment” to inform planning. The RTO said it will use its updated, 20-year transmission planning futures in South planning once it’s done reformulating them. The transmission futures are due to be completed in early 2026. (See MISO Seeking Realistic Gen Buildout for Tx Planning Futures.)

Rauch said MISO will focus first on Louisiana’s needs “knowing that there are challenges” with load pockets and large load additions in the state. She said the RTO would develop a detailed scope of work for the South with stakeholders.

MISO said the load pocket assessment would estimate the risk of load shedding, with an initial focus on the Downstream of Gypsy load pocket in southeastern Louisiana, where load shedding occurred in late May.

Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis has said the Memorial Day weekend load shed event in New Orleans demonstrates the state needs more transmission capacity in and around the Downstream of Gypsy load pocket, which predates Entergy’s inclusion into MISO. (See MISO Debates What-ifs, Vows Improvements in Front of La. PSC After Load Shed.)

MISO South contains four major load pockets: Western, in East Texas; West of the Atchafalaya Basin, in East Texas and southwestern Louisiana; and Amite South and Downstream of Gypsy, in southeastern Louisiana.

Rauch said MISO’s early modeling could uncover issues where generation solutions — not new transmission — would be more appropriate. She said the RTO aims for solutions that South members “could pick up on and run with.”

MISO also said it plans to discontinue use of the word “tranche” to refer to the series of long-term portfolios. “Tranche 1” and “Tranche 2” referred to the first, $10.4 billion long-range portfolio and the second, $21.8 billion portfolio, respectively.

The Alliance for Affordable Energy’s Yvonne Cappel-Vickery said she hoped the phaseout of the word doesn’t mean that MISO South long-range planning would be “less robust” than in the Midwest.

At a Sept. 17 meeting of the Advisory Committee, Wisconsin Public Service Commissioner Marcus Hawkins asked when MISO might address its Midwest-South transfer constraint. The RTO originally said it would concentrate on the constraint in a fourth long-range transmission portfolio.

“Today, there certainly is some congestion on the North-South boundary,” said Jennifer Curran, senior vice president of planning and operations. But she added that as issues evolve in MISO, adding capacity on the constraint has decreased in urgency.

“I don’t think it’s a near-term priority economically or for reliability. But certainly, we will keep an eye on it.”