On Friday, October 16, 2026, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order that creates something the American grid has never had: an independent reviewer of the transmission spending category that owners control almost entirely on their own say-so. In Docket Nos. ER26-3533-000 and ER26-3534-000 — published as 197 FERC ¶ 61,042 — the Commission accepted a joint filing that designates ISO New England as the region’s Asset Condition Reviewer, with authority to examine utility-planned transmission replacement and rebuild projects for technical need, cost-effectiveness, and alternatives. The tariff and Transmission Operating Agreement revisions take effect January 1, 2027.
The filing itself arrived August 17, 2026, jointly from ISO New England, the New England Power Pool Participants Committee, and the Participating Transmission Owners Administrative Committee — a rare alignment in which the transmission owners were asking for the oversight they would receive. It won unanimous support at NEPOOL from the six New England states, the transmission owners, consumer advocates, and other stakeholders. Two commissioners wrote separately to commend the deal and, notably, to urge the rest of the country to copy it.
This is the first independent-review framework of its kind in the United States, and it is worth understanding precisely — because what it does, and pointedly does not do, tells you how far New England has gotten toward solving the governance half of the transmission bottleneck this publication described at length.
The $5 billion category that escaped review
Asset condition projects are the transmission world’s maintenance fleet: capital projects by Participating Transmission Owners to replace or reconstruct aging, deteriorating, or obsolete transmission elements, undertaken to maintain the integrity of the system. They are local reliability work — a line section with deteriorated poles, a substation full of obsolete breakers, a cable at the end of its service life. Unsexy, numerous, and enormous.
The numbers explain why this category attracted a FERC order. Asset condition projects make up 73 percent of New England transmission owners’ annual capital projects, according to figures cited by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., in an August letter to FERC. A June ISO New England presentation put expected asset condition spending at roughly $5 billion by 2034, including about $1.3 billion next year. Transmission charges already make up about 15 percent of a Connecticut electric bill, per Blumenthal — the backdrop that had the senator asking FERC for greater oversight and, separately, introducing legislation that would require the Commission to weigh affordability in its just-and-reasonable standard and deem transmission rate increases unaffordable if they would raise overall retail rates by 5 percent or more.
The grievances were concrete. In May, New England ratepayer advocates filed a complaint at FERC over a roughly $360-million asset condition project Eversource planned in New Hampshire — the X-178 project — alleging the company had mischaracterized the work to subject it to lesser scrutiny. Commissioner David Rosner’s concurrence cites a still-earlier case, The Connecticut Light & Power Co. (196 FERC ¶ 61,150, 2026), where the same pattern of concern surfaced. And the complaints were not isolated: Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has been pressing utilities over an estimated $1.5 billion in transmission refunds owed to New England customers under a federal order, with a May 20, 2027 completion deadline, while all six New England governors oppose the transmission owners’ April request to raise their base return on equity to 11.39 percent.
Under the Transmission Operating Agreement as it stood, this whole category lived in a governance gap. The transmission owners own their facilities and hold “the right and obligation to physically operate, repair, maintain, and replace those facilities.” ISO New England’s role was narrow: it reviewed new or materially changed owner plans only for significant adverse effects on system stability, reliability, or operating characteristics; it reviewed cost allocation applications to decide whether asset condition costs should be “localized” — excluded from the regional rate and borne locally; and it maintained an Asset Condition List, updated three times a year, that captured projects and cost information. An inventory, in other words — not a judgment. The party proposing the spending also defined the need, chose the solution, and kept the records.
What changes on January 1
The Asset Condition Reviewer role is, in the filing’s own words, “an entirely new function for ISO-NE and is separate and distinct from ISO-NE’s existing roles and responsibilities.” It has three primary jobs.
First, it will review the transmission owners’ Asset Monitoring and Evaluation Practices — the guides, procedures, risk assessments, and prioritization frameworks that lead a company to identify projects in the first place — report its findings to the Planning Advisory Committee, identify variations and inefficiencies across owners, and push consideration of best practices. This is the standardization half of the job: today one utility’s replacement threshold is another’s maintenance judgment, and there has been no regional mechanism to compare them.
Second, it will review and report its conclusions on individual asset condition projects and project programs that cross specified thresholds — including projects implementing NERC CIP-014 physical-security mitigation plans. For individual projects, the threshold is forecast Pool Transmission Facilities costs of $25 million or more on an individual line or at a single station or substation over a period of five years or less. For programs — collections of projects addressing a common documented need across similar facilities — the review triggers at $100 million in forecast PTF costs, or where a program affects 15 percent or more of an owner’s PTF lines or substations, spends more than $5 million on any individual line or substation, and is forecast to cost $25 million or more over five years.
Third, it will produce annual and periodic reporting on asset condition matters to the Planning Advisory Committee. A new group inside ISO-NE’s System Planning Department will do the work and report up to the board’s System Planning and Reliability Committee. To give the reviewer real visibility, the revised Transmission Operating Agreement grants ISO-NE access to owner equipment-level information.
The process itself is designed in three steps — need review, solution-and-alternatives review, and reporting — built for early engagement so owners can course-correct on feedback before plans harden. It runs through the Planning Advisory Committee as the primary stakeholder forum, in an open process modeled on the regional system planning process.
What the reviewer cannot do
The limits were negotiated as carefully as the powers, and they are what made unanimity possible. The order is explicit: the reviewer is advisory. It will not decide whether any project proceeds. It will not make a legal finding on whether a project’s costs are prudent. It will not be the petitioning party in any local, state, or federal regulatory or siting proceeding concerning a project. The transmission owners will continue to plan, develop, own, and maintain their facilities — and they will indemnify ISO-NE for liability tied to the reviewer role, except for gross negligence or willful misconduct.
It also changes nothing about the two things ISO-NE already reviews: the significant-adverse-impact screen on owner plans and the transmission cost allocation localization reviews stay exactly as they are. Asset condition spending remains under FERC jurisdiction, recovered through formula-rate procedures. And the reviewer does not touch “right-sizing” — the Order 1920 concept of sizing replacement projects for long-term needs rather than in-kind replacement — which several commenters, including the Maine Office of the Public Advocate and Advanced Energy United, flagged as unfinished business. The Commission ruled those questions beyond the scope of this section 205 proceeding.
One clarification matters for readers tracking the region’s other dockets: this is a section 205 tariff filing, jointly proposed — a different animal entirely from the section 206 proceeding FERC opened over ISO New England’s treatment of large loads. The two share a region, not a subject.
Why the owners agreed
That the transmission owners co-filed their own scrutiny is the order’s most telling feature, and it has a rational explanation. Advisory review with published conclusions converts an argument owners were losing in the political arena into a process they can manage in a technical one. A clean review letter from the regional operator becomes evidence — something an owner can cite before a state commission, a permitting board, or FERC itself when a project’s prudence or necessity is challenged. In a region where every large capital project now arrives trailing an affordability argument, that evidentiary value is real.
The interim experience supports the bet. ISO-NE has already been acting as an interim reviewer for some projects this year — nine projects were identified for an interim process — and the owners did not walk away. The practical burden on them is reporting, data access, and earlier engagement with the Planning Advisory Committee: meaningful, but a lighter lift than the alternative the states were openly demanding, which was a harder prudence regime.
Rosner and Chang: build trust, or don’t build
The concurrences are where the order’s ambition is stated most plainly, and they read as an invitation the rest of the country may find hard to refuse.
Commissioner Rosner, writing that ISO-NE’s is a “first-of-its-kind proposal,” put the theory of change in one sentence: “In the context of growing demand and an aging electric grid, building trust and confidence in the need for infrastructure will only serve to expedite permitting and improve the likelihood that projects are ultimately constructed.” He praised the collaboration that produced an uncontested filing and “call[ed] on other regions to take note of this model and the spirit of collaboration that made it possible.”
Commissioner Chang went further on the substance. She restated the reviewer’s three objectives — demonstrating technical need, making cost-effectiveness integral to solution development, and timely comprehensive reporting — and then added two forward-looking nudges: she called on other regions to “create arrangements similar to the Asset Condition Reviewer,” and she encouraged ISO-NE and any regions that follow “to consider whether to extend this expert review and assessment role to consider other types of local transmission projects, beyond what New England categorizes as asset condition projects.” The current scope covers replacement of aging kit. Chang is already pointing at everything else local — the very category that Order 1000’s planning reforms never fully reached.
What this means for the buildout
Strip away the procedure and the order is an institutional bet on the premise this publication has argued repeatedly: the binding constraint on transmission is not engineering but governance. Asset condition spending is the clearest illustration. Rebuilding existing lines and substations avoids the veto-point gauntlet that kills greenfield lines — no new rights-of-way, no multi-state siting fight. But it traded the siting veto for a credibility veto: when the company doing the work also grades its own homework, every project becomes an affordability fight, every rate filing a trust referendum, and the buildout slows anyway.
An independent, expert, published review is the cheapest way to defuse that fight. Utility Dive’s August coverage of the proposal put it crisply: ISO-NE’s findings could give stakeholders ammunition to challenge cost recovery later. But the reverse is equally true — a favorable review is ammunition the owners can use to defend recovery and, in Rosner’s telling, to move projects through permitting faster. The review does not adjudicate prudence; it creates the factual record on which prudence gets adjudicated, in FERC formula-rate proceedings and before state commissions.
The honest caveat is that this is a spotlight, not a brake. A reviewer that finds an owner’s need case thin cannot stop the project, and whether such findings ever move a rate proceeding depends on whether states and FERC act on them. The unanimous stakeholder support is both the order’s strength and its tell: nothing this uncontested has teeth. Its effectiveness will be measured not in reports issued but in findings that changed a scope, shrunk a budget, or killed a project — the metrics Advanced Energy United asked the region to track.
What to watch
Five things will show whether the order delivers. First, the interim reviews already underway: what the reviewer concludes about the nine projects in the interim process, and whether any of those conclusions alter scope, timing, or cost before the formal regime begins. Second, the staffing build — the filing is candid that ISO-NE needs time to hire people with specialized skills and build documentation, which is why effectiveness lags the January 1 date. Third, the first Planning Advisory Committee reporting cycle, which will reveal how standardized the owners’ monitoring practices actually are. Fourth, whether any other RTO takes Rosner and Chang up on the invitation — a second region adopting the model is the signal that this becomes a national template rather than a New England exception. And fifth, the unfinished items the commenters named: metrics to measure the reviewer’s effectiveness, and whether ISO-NE eventually folds right-sizing of replacement projects into the review, as Order 1920 implementation proceeds.
The grid is aging, demand is growing, and the money is already flowing to refurbishment — roughly $5 billion of it in New England alone over the next decade. Until now, no independent expert in the country examined whether that money was buying the right work at the right price. Starting January 1, in one region, someone will. The rest of the country will be watching what the record shows — and what, if anything, it changes.