Despite over a decade in operation, SERTP has yet to plan a regional transmission line and continues to delay meaningful action on FERC's Order 1920, raising concerns about transparency and accountability.

At a March 25 meeting convened by the Southeastern Regional Transmission Planning organization (SERTP), a large group of people met—as they do four times a year—to discuss the region’s power needs and whether the grid needs to be expanded to accommodate them.

As the meeting began, SERTP issued an increasingly common directive to those of us in attendance: We will not be discussing Order 1920, so don’t bother asking.

Some background on what this means may be important.

While most grid planning in the southeast is done by utilities within their own footprints, SERTP was created in response to a 2010 order from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) aimed at increasing the number of high-voltage power lines going across state boundaries and between utilities. These transmission lines are like highways for electricity: they may not be organically built by local communities, but they are essential to moving things at high volume.

A slow start

SERTP has never built or even planned a regional transmission line in more than a decade of its existence. Last year, FERC issued another rule, Order 1920, to address this ongoing failure of regional transmission.

SACE has previously broken down the details of Order 1920. The order requires utilities to start planning over a longer time horizon (20 years) and consider a number of potential benefits of new power lines that are left out of current analyses. (These include mitigation of extreme weather events, reduced energy loss on the lines, and a number of other virtues of having more space for power on the grid.)

As SACE has previously written, utilities in the Southeast have yet to announce any plans to comply with Order 1920 and have made several procedural moves to delay the deadline for legal compliance. The most recent and significant of these is SERTP’s request—now granted by FERC—to extend the deadline by a year, to June 2026.

Holding a meeting is not the same thing as taking action

What SERTP has been doing to prepare for Order 1920, and what it will do with the additional time it now has, is something of a mystery. According to the extension request it filed with FERC, SERTP’s efforts thus far have included “extensive working group meetings” between its member utilities (Duke, Southern Company, Dominion Energy, and others) as well as “outreach to neighboring regions.” 

The output of these conversations is not known to SACE or to the public. Since Order 1920 was issued, SERTP has declined to address it in any of its stakeholder meetings, except for two:

1. An “educational session” on December 6th, 2024, which broke down the requirements included in Order 1920 but provided no information about what SERTP was doing to meet them. 
2. A “stakeholder engagement meeting” held on January 29th of this year, in which regional nonprofit groups and other stakeholders were invited to offer feedback and suggestions on what SERTP might do to improve regional transmission. SERTP members made it clear during the course of this meeting that they were there only to listen and would not be taking questions.

It is, of course, possible that the conversations held between the utilities who run SERTP have been deep and substantive. But the extension request paperwork—which is the only information available to anyone outside of the utilities themselves—indicates that a number of critical decisions have yet to be made. Among the things these utilities have not decided are:

• whether or not new software will be needed to examine the benefits of new power lines
• who might supply that software, if needed, and for what price
• what new planning procedures might be needed to meet the new federal standards
• how those new planning procedures might be integrated with current ones

If these relatively fundamental questions remained undecided after more than six months of conversations among the member utilities, it’s fair to ask what has been decided. But stakeholders have been advised not to ask, and in any case, no answers have been given.

Holding meetings is not the same thing as listening

The community of advocates has been more than willing to offer ideas for what these processes might look like. Utilities outside the southeast, particularly those in the region known as MISO, have developed planning processes that meet many of the Order 1920 standards. We know that SERTP is aware of this because we presented it to them in some detail at the stakeholder engagement meeting. 

At the March 25th meeting earlier this week, I asked SERTP when, if ever, the stakeholders might hear back about the suggestions we have already shared. They offered no promise that we would get such an explicit reply and added that future stakeholder meetings may be delayed.

In fact, holding meetings is not necessarily anything

SERTP is within its legal rights to behave this way. Its meetings occur on schedule, its papers are in order, and the entity that regulates it—FERC—has given its blessings. But fifteen years after SERTP was formed to plan regional transmission, it cannot claim sole responsibility for a single new pole in the ground. 

Transmission can be arcane, but it matters. A well-planned and coordinated regional grid can be the difference between a manageable monthly bill and a shocking one; between a system that crashes in extreme weather and one that keeps people from shivering at home on Christmas Eve; and most starkly, between a livable climate and a hostile one. At some point, if we want these things, another meeting is not going to do the trick. Someone’s got to pick up a shovel and start to dig.