On Wednesday afternoon, in a briefing room hosted by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, the transmission-policy community heard a number that landed like a verdict. FERC Commissioner David Rosner told the room that the federal requirements for neighboring grid regions to coordinate on transmission planning — on the books since 2011 — have produced “exactly zero interregional transmission projects.” Not few. Zero. Fifteen years of coordination requirements, and the country has built nothing across the seams they were supposed to cover.
That same week, four senators offered an answer. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 — S. 5653, unveiled September 30 by Senate Environment and Public Works chair Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and ranking member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), alongside Energy and Natural Resources chair Mike Lee (R-UT) and ranking member Martin Heinrich (D-NM) — would require FERC to establish standards for interregional transmission planning and cost allocation. It is a permitting and grid-governance package with many provisions, but the interregional planning mandate is its most structurally ambitious: it targets the one layer of the power system for which no one is currently responsible.
The missing layer
To understand why this matters, start with the geography. The contiguous United States is divided into 12 transmission-planning regions, each of which plans its own grid under rules FERC has built up over two decades — most recently Order 1920, which requires 20-year, scenario-based regional planning. The physical grid beneath those regions is three vast synchronous machines: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and ERCOT in Texas, with only a handful of direct-current ties between them.
What sits between these layers is nothing. A federal framework exists for regional planning — each of the 12 regions planning for itself — but no comparable framework exists for jointly planning transmission across regions. There is no institution whose job is to look at the continent-scale machine as a system, identify the lines that would most help the whole, and drive them toward construction. As the foundational explainer on this desk’s bottleneck problem put it, the result is a paradox visible in every major event review: everyone agrees more interregional capacity would have helped, and no one is clearly responsible for building it.
The seams are where coordination fails most thoroughly. Each planning region optimizes for its own load, its own reliability standards, its own state regulators and its own politics. A line that would benefit two or three regions simultaneously — by moving cheap Great Plains wind east during a heat wave, or Midwestern power south during a winter storm — belongs to no region’s plan. Each side waits for the other to justify it. This is not a failure of engineering; it is a failure of jurisdiction. Nobody owns the between.
How thin the ties really are
At the EESI briefing — titled “Bridging the Transmission Gap” and co-hosted with the World Resources Institute — Mark Falinski, WRI’s senior manager for power transition and decarbonization, described U.S. grid regions as “barely connected,” and the numbers support the adjective. In most regions, the ties to neighbors can carry less than 10 percent of peak load, and often only 1 to 3 percent. The regions exist side by side like buildings that share a wall but have almost no doors.
That thinness is a choice, and other systems have chosen differently. Falinski noted the U.S. lags Europe in interregional connectivity, and China even further. Those comparisons deserve some care — China’s grid is centrally planned by the state, and Europe’s interconnections evolved under a very different regulatory bargain — but the physical point stands regardless of governance: modest amounts of additional transfer capability between regions that do not peak at the same time deliver outsized reliability and economic benefits, because neighboring regions’ weather risks are only partially correlated. During extreme events, the regions that fared best were the ones that could import power from neighbors not stressed at the same moment.
The current arrangement means each region must effectively self-insure against its worst days with its own generation. That self-insurance is expensive — it is what capacity is for, and capacity costs money — and it is the quiet reason electricity bills in constrained regions carry the premiums they do. Interregional ties are shared insurance, and the U.S. has barely bought any.
Why 2011’s coordination requirement produced nothing
The obvious question is how a federal coordination mandate could exist for fifteen years and yield zero projects. The answer is the distinction between coordination and planning. FERC’s Order 1000, issued in 2011, required neighboring regions to coordinate their planning — to share information, to hold joint meetings, to consider each other’s plans. What it did not do was require them to jointly identify projects, assign costs across the seam, or build anything together.
Coordination, in practice, meant each region ran its own process and politely compared notes. Each side used its own benefit metrics, its own modeling assumptions, its own scenarios. A project that looked beneficial under the Western region’s assumptions might look marginal under the Eastern region’s — and since no shared standard defined which benefits counted, each region’s planners could honestly conclude the line was the other region’s idea. Without agreed benefits, there could be no agreed cost allocation; without cost allocation, no project could clear the beneficiary-pays test that governs who funds transmission.
That is the gap S. 5653 is designed to close. The bill does not merely ask regions to coordinate harder. It directs FERC to conduct a rulemaking establishing baseline standards for interregional planning and cost allocation — including defining the benefits that regional grid operators may consider in their analysis, and clarifying that consumers who would not benefit from a project should not have to pay for it. The standard-setting is the substance: once there is a shared definition of what counts as a benefit, regions can no longer talk past each other with incompatible metrics. Then, under the rule, grid operators would be required to develop plans consistent with those standards.
Planning is not building: the bill’s second half
But a planning standard, by itself, builds no lines. This desk’s earlier reporting on the transmission bottleneck established the veto-point problem: planning processes can identify beneficial lines all day, but states must still site them, and someone must still agree to pay. A plan is an analysis. Authority and money are the other two legs, and S. 5653 takes aim at both.
On the authority leg, the bill would give FERC enhanced federal backstop siting authority for lines over 230 kilovolts, letting developers apply to FERC and state regulators simultaneously. Crucially, it would eliminate the long-failing requirement that the Department of Energy first designate National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors before federal backstop authority applies — a process that has been ineffective since its creation in 2005. It would also simplify FERC’s project-evaluation criteria, distilling them from seven considerations to four, while preserving states’ authority over intrastate and low-voltage lines. The model, as the Niskanen Center’s analysis noted, is closer to how FERC already approves natural gas pipelines — a system that, whatever its other faults, actually builds infrastructure.
This pairing matters. Planning and permitting are two separate problems, and the bill treats them as such: the interregional planning mandate gets lines identified on a shared analytical basis, and the siting provisions give them a path to approval that no longer dies on a single state’s desk. One without the other reproduces the status quo. The bottleneck explainer’s core warning — that rules can require planners to identify beneficial lines but cannot make states approve them — is precisely what the backstop provision is written to answer.
On the money leg, the bill defines cost-allocation guardrails: regional operators would consider a defined set of benefits, and consumers who would not benefit would not be charged. It also codifies the existing federal ban on rights of first refusal — the state and federal provisions that let incumbent utilities block competitors from building regionally planned lines — and extends that ban to lines in an interregional plan. The ROFR fight has been a slow-motion threat to competitive transmission development; locking the door at the interregional level before it can be reinvented there is forward-looking policy.
The rest of the package: seeing the whole grid at once
Several other provisions in the bill deserve attention because they address the same structural blindness from different directions. One would require FERC to start a rulemaking combining transmission and generation planning into a single process with standardized data outputs — so that, as the Southwest Power Pool is already piloting, planners model where power will be made and where the wires to move it should go in one integrated exercise, with data standards that let neighboring regions and interregional developers speak the same language. The interconnection queue gets its own rulemaking: grid planners would have to use software automation to clear the backlog of generation projects waiting years for studies, which is the transmission scarcity problem wearing its most visible costume.
The bill also tackles grid-enhancing technologies — dynamic line ratings, advanced reconductoring, and the like — by requiring utilities to study where such technologies can be deployed, publish the results, and then actually use them there. The current underuse of these technologies is largely an incentive problem: they earn thin regulated returns relative to their savings. Mandating their deployment where justified is a short-term pressure valve on congestion while the longer-term lines move through the new planning process.
And a consumer-protection provision would let states ask FERC to review projects that utilities have classified as merely “local” to escape regional scrutiny — closing the loophole where monopoly utilities pad rate base with projects that were never properly examined. It is the kind of provision that only exists because utilities have spent decades exploiting the seams between regulatory jurisdictions. There is a theme in this bill: every seam in the governance structure is a place where something valuable has been quietly failing to happen.
What happens next — and what not to expect
Enthusiasm should be calibrated. The Senate is scheduled to recess after this week until past the midterm elections, which means a floor vote cannot happen before November. The Akin Gump analysis expects Senate floor consideration in early November, with House action after that and procedural hurdles remaining. In other words, the bill is an opening bid in a negotiation, not a statute — and its most consequential provisions, like the FERC rulemaking on interregional planning, would themselves take years to implement even after passage. A rulemaking of this scope would be expected to draw extensive litigation and compliance wrangling before the first joint interregional plan emerged.
It is also worth being explicit about what the bill does not do. It does not guarantee that any specific line gets built. It does not resolve the deeper federalism tension between state siting authority and national infrastructure needs — it narrows it. It does not change the physics of the three interconnections, and it does not manufacture the specialized workforce or the two-year transformer lead times that constrain construction once lines are approved. Planning standards fix the analysis; backstop siting narrows the veto points; but the governance of the physical grid will remain a negotiated settlement among jurisdictions that optimize for their own constituents.
Still, the bill is best read as the first serious attempt to give the continent-scale grid a brain. For decades the United States has operated the largest machine ever built with no institution responsible for planning it as a whole — twelve regions planning for themselves, three interconnections barely tied together, and a fifteen-year coordination mandate that produced exactly zero projects. If a planning standard and a siting pathway finally give the seams an owner, the next extreme-weather event’s post-mortem might read differently. That is the bet S. 5653 makes, and it is a bet that has been a long time coming.
[Mara Ellison covers the Electric Grid desk. The bill’s data center cost-allocation provisions — requiring large data centers to cover the transmission upgrades they drive — are covered on our Data Centers desk this morning.]