In the United States, the current system for interconnecting large electric loads, like data centers, to the grid has left all sides frustrated. Data center developers are mired in slow interconnection processes. Meanwhile, electricity customers face rising rates and threats to grid reliability as the nation’s grid operators struggle to interconnect new power plants and batteries to the system quickly enough to meet rising demand. This brief outlines policy considerations for FERC to evaluate and highlights processes and mechanisms that grid operators would need to develop in order to maximize the benefits of load flexibility for electricity consumers. FERC has docketed the DOE Advanced Notice Of Proposed Rulemaking (RM26-4) and requested an initial round of comments by November 14, 2025, and reply comments by November 28, 2025. UPDATE: FERC has extended the initial comment period to November 21, 2025, with reply comments due by December 5, 2025.

The Nicholas Institute's Tim Profeta contributed an essay to "How to Advance Environmental Protection During a Turbulent Era," a special section in the March/April issue of Environmental Forum. The Trump administration is expected to take up a deregulatory agenda—which environmentalists anticipate with trepidation but which businesses generally welcome as an appropriate relaxation of regulations they say inhibit a creative free market and stymie investments in needed projects.

In late July 2023, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released its much-anticipated rule on interconnection reform, Order 2023. This policy brief explores a deeper reform option known as connect and manage. This less restrictive interconnection approach could speed the deployment of resources in a way that can be managed after their integration with the grid, leading to a larger volume of interconnected generation capacity without sacrificing reliability.

After decades of failed proposals, the Western United States stands on the precipice of a regionalized electricity market. Current momentum exists in large part because of the success of extant real-time energy imbalance markets, stood up first by the California Independent System Operator in the mid-2010s and more recently by the Southwest Power Pool.

Using a simulation tool, the authors investigate the effects created by a US state defecting from the wholesale electricity market in an organized electric grid on the states that remain in the coalition. The report finds that if a net-importing state defects, the remaining states’ producers are worse off and the remaining states’ consumers are better off. The opposite effect takes hold if the defecting state is a net-exporter. Furthermore, the authors find evidence that defection impacts the remaining states’ climate initiatives.

Given stated stakeholder clean energy and consumer goals, this paper offers a way to evaluate options for enhancing competition, compared to how utilities traditionally operate the electricity grid. The focus here is on wholesale transactions between generators and utilities serving end-use customers. These utilities then sell electricity at retail to their customers, and in many regions including the Southeast, they are state-regulated monopolies responsible for serving their customers at least cost.

This case study lays out the four Southern proposals submitted to FERC, and chronicles how this directive played out in the South. In a sidebar, the case study also describes the retail competition vision being explored in North Carolina during the same time period. While the Southern Grids did not launch, the GridSouth (in the Carolinas) and the GridFlorida proposals reflect a concerted effort by the participating utilities to explore market creation, as well sustained engagement – and some support – by regulators and stakeholders.

The RTOGov project seeks to explore the links between decision-making processes and outcomes in our power markets. Led by researchers at Duke University and funded through a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, RTOGov is a growing network of researchers exploring the most important decision-making bodies never heard of in the United States.

As electricity companies in low- and middle-income countries move deeper into rural regions, the cost of new connections generally increases while the electricity demanded by these new customers remains lower than urban and peri-urban customers. This is a challenging dynamic for utilities looking to sustain their financial health as well as for governments tasked with engineering viable strategies for achieving universal electrification.

Cost-of-service states with vertically integrated utilities can manage a rapidly changing electricity sector by expanding opportunities for competition, even while maintaining the traditional vertically integrated utility. In fact, competition has been deployed successfully by cost of service states to meet customer needs, bring down costs, and encourage innovation.