Rather than a single national rule on large-load interconnection, the Commission ordered each FERC-jurisdictional RTO/ISO to individually justify or reform its own procedures — Chairman Swett's stated bet is that six parallel show-cause dockets move faster than one rulemaking ever could. Generation-adequacy reports were due mid-July; worth tracking docket-by-docket rather than waiting on a uniform standard.
$1.7B in contracts awarded to Quanta and Kiewit for Phase 1 of the 800-mile, $11B HVDC line — structured, notably, to avoid ratepayer funding.
Record capacity additions ease near-term risk; New England, the Pacific Northwest, and Saskatchewan remain elevated-risk under extreme conditions.
The ANOPR that preceded the June show-cause orders — DOE pressed a "transmission-only" jurisdictional theory to keep the reform squarely in FERC's lane and away from state-preemption fights over siting and retail service.
The build-rate gap: 888 miles of high-voltage transmission built in 2024, against a DOE estimate that 5,000 miles/year is needed to keep pace with demand.
A standing tracker of FERC's interconnection and extreme-weather planning dockets, including the "first-ready, first-served" cluster study mandate.
Would shift NIETC corridor-designation authority to FERC and allow self-certification within them. DOE's own NIETC shortlist has been stuck at three candidate corridors all spring — a useful gauge of how slow permitting reform still moves relative to demand growth.
Why data centers' load profile — steady, inflexible, enormous — is straining planning frameworks like PJM's that were built around more predictable customer classes.
A joint Minnesota Power / Great River Energy line, $1B+, in service by 2030. Worth watching as a bellwether for how fast the rest of Tranche 1 moves.
A small case study: modernizing a Vermont-to-Massachusetts line originally built for the Quabbin/Wachusett reservoir construction era, driven by ISO-NE's ~11% demand-growth projection by the mid-2030s.
Standing reference on DOE's revolving-fund transmission program — includes the Southern Spirit HVDC tie (first-ever ERCOT–Southeast interconnection) and the Idaho-to-Nevada Southwest Intertie.
Cross-checks NERC's assessment against Lawrence Berkeley National Lab interconnection-queue data — largely corroborates the New England / Northwest elevated-risk calls, but suggests both regions may be more resource-adequate under extreme stress-tests than the headline numbers imply.
NERC's John Moura on record cautioning against reading capacity-addition headlines as falling risk overall — the tension between "GW added" and the underlying LOLE/LOLH/EUE/EEA metrics that actually drive risk categorization.
Still the standard citation this cycle for GNN-based AC optimal power flow with contingency robustness baked in — the throughline connecting most of the newer solver papers below.
A residual-learning approach positioned explicitly against CANOS- and KCLNet-style baselines, benchmarked on the PowerGraph GNN dataset. A good current-state-of-the-art jumping-off point.
Useful antidote to PINN enthusiasm — catalogs where physics-informed solvers break down (worst-case constraint violation, generalization across topology change) and surveys the KKT-informed and constraint-projection patches proposed since.
Zooms out from individual solver papers to situate CANOS-style work within the emerging "foundation models for grid" conversation, alongside time-series foundation models.