California continues to add in-state renewable energy resources, but the transmission upgrades needed to bring those projects online have been lagging behind, according to the Public Utilities Commission.

Nevada regulators approved a construction permit for the SWIP-North transmission line, keeping the project on track for a 2028 operation date.

California’s two large offshore wind projects could be delayed by up to six years due to recent federal policy actions, a CPUC administrative law judge said.

The California PUC wants CAISO to come up with a way to pause settlements of certain congestion revenue allocations in the ISO’s upcoming Extended Day-Ahead Market if participants begin to game the market through extensive self-scheduling.

The California Public Utility Commission approved construction of a set of transmission infrastructure projects to support a 90-MW data center owned by Microsoft, but questions remain about whether the upgrades will increase or decrease ratepayer costs.

CAISO has proposed new interconnection criteria to flush out stale projects from a generator interconnection queue that has reached record volumes in recent years.

California’s electricity consumption is projected to increase dramatically over the coming decades due in large part to planned artificial intelligence data centers, although questions remain about how many of those data centers actually will be built.

Flexibility will be a core attribute of the various scenarios and solutions being discussed to meet the snowballing estimates of U.S. electric power demand, says columnist K Kaufmann.

The Extended Day-Ahead Market took center stage at CAISO in 2025 as the ISO tabled other long-term initiatives to ensure the market’s timely launch in May 2026, with PacifiCorp as its first participant.