Transmission Is Now 39% of Exelon's $41.7 Billion Plan, Up From 21%

Exelon told investors on October 30 that transmission now accounts for 39 percent of its capital spending, up from 21 percent in the plan it replaced. The company's $41.7 billion program running through 2029 carries $16.3 billion of transmission work, measured against $31.3 billion of total spending in the earlier 2023 to 2026 plan. Exelon owns no power plants. It separated from Constellation Energy in February 2022 and kept only the wires, which means nearly every dollar in the plan turns into substation, line and distribution construction rather than generation.

Exelon's chief financial officer told analysts that rate base will grow 7.9 percent annually through 2029 and that transmission alone is growing at 16 percent. Management reiterated $12 billion to $17 billion of additional transmission opportunity beyond the current plan over the next decade, most of it arriving in 2030 or later. In PJM's 2025 regional transmission expansion window the company submitted $700 million of projects on its own and participated in another $1.7 billion developed jointly with NextEra Energy Transmission. Exelon is one of only four operators of 765-kilovolt transmission facilities in the United States.

The spending is pulled by load the utilities have not yet served. Exelon counts roughly 11 gigawatts of high-probability large load through 2034, about nine gigawatts of it at ComEd in northern Illinois and two gigawatts across the Mid-Atlantic utilities. That number stood at 18 gigawatts at the end of 2025 before transmission security agreements, which give a prospective customer 30 days to commit and ten years of transmission bills to pay, cleared out speculative requests. Another 23 gigawatts sits in cluster studies. Roughly 10 percent of the high-probability load is expected to be energized by 2028, and about three quarters of it by 2034. The company told investors PJM could face a capacity shortfall of about 11.5 gigawatts by 2030.

Storage is the newer line item. Atlantic City Electric owns a proposed 500-megawatt battery in southern New Jersey, developed with Invenergy, which Exelon describes as the largest battery storage installation in PJM. Commercial operation is targeted for 2030, and the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities is expected to issue a final cost-recovery order in the first quarter of 2027. Exelon put the project's net customer benefit at $761 million over the life of the asset and sized a further 1.5 to 3.5 gigawatts, or $3 billion to $7 billion, of regulated storage beyond the current plan. Utility ownership of storage is currently permitted in New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware.

For electrical contractors the composition matters more than the headline number. A transmission and distribution utility with no generation fleet converts its capital into substation construction and rebuilds, medium- and high-voltage terminations, protective relaying and control wiring, underground and overhead distribution, and the switchgear and interconnection scope a 500-megawatt battery requires. That work is spread across six regulated utilities in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and the District of Columbia, each jurisdiction licensing electricians on its own terms, so a contractor following the spend across territories is also following six sets of licensing requirements. ComEd's $15.3 billion grid plan is still awaiting an Illinois Commerce Commission order, expected by December 15.

A utility barred from building generation builds everything else instead, and all of it is wire.