FERC Clears $909M of MISO's 765-kV Backbone to Be Built Inside PJM

Federal regulators signed off on August 14 on the cost-allocation framework the Midcontinent Independent System Operator needs in order to have two PJM utilities build pieces of its long-range transmission plan. Commonwealth Edison will construct roughly $904 million of that work and Duke Energy Ohio another $5.3 million, all of it sitting physically inside PJM's footprint but planned, and paid for, as part of MISO's Midwest portfolio.

The portfolio is Tranche 2.1 of MISO's Long Range Transmission Planning process, approved by the grid operator's board on December 12, 2024. It carries a $21.8 billion price tag across 24 projects and 323 individual facilities, adding 3,631 miles of 765-kilovolt and 345-kilovolt backbone with in-service dates targeted between 2032 and 2034. MISO's Midwest territory interlocks with PJM's in northern Illinois and Ohio, so several of the facilities that make the plan work land on the far side of the seam between the two grid operators.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission also rejected arguments that the two utilities' share should be opened to competitive solicitation, holding that MISO has no authority to require or facilitate transmission development inside another region. Two commissioners wrote separately that the benefits at stake, including improved reliability, lower congestion costs and more efficient resource integration, are interregional by nature.

Cost allocation is the step that turns a planning document into a construction program. Until the question of who pays for a facility is settled, a utility will not commit to detailed engineering, will not sign for long-lead equipment, and will not put a project into its rate base. The August order removes that uncertainty from the eastern edge of the largest transmission portfolio ever approved in the United States.

The rest of Tranche 2.1 is already being handed to builders. In January, MISO selected Midcontinent Grid Solutions, a joint venture of Transource Energy and BHE Transmission, to build the Bell Center-Columbia-Sugar Creek line, nearly 200 miles of 765-kilovolt construction in Wisconsin at an estimated $1.2 billion. In May, MISO named a consortium of Ameren Transmission Company of Illinois, GridLiance Heartland, Dairyland Power Cooperative and the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency to deliver two Illinois projects covering about 237 miles for a combined $1.658 billion. Both selections carry 2034 in-service dates.

For the electrical trades, the meaningful detail is not the line miles. It is the stations. The Illinois package alone includes a new 765/345-kilovolt substation, and 765-kilovolt is largely unfamiliar equipment across most of the Midwest. Station construction at that class means control enclosures, protection and relay panels, station service and auxiliary power, DC battery systems, extensive grounding, and SCADA and fiber terminations, all of it work that sits closer to commercial and industrial wiring than to line construction. Transmission structures are erected by outside line crews. The buildings, the control houses and the interconnection scope behind them are not.

The load driving the whole program is the same load reshaping every utility capital plan in the country. Exelon, ComEd's parent, raised its four-year capital plan to $41.3 billion in February, a nine percent increase, with more than 70 percent of the added spending attributed to transmission. The company reported an 18-gigawatt high-probability data center pipeline at the time and roughly 43 gigawatts of large-load interconnection requests under study.

The timing matters for anyone reading this as a hiring signal. In-service dates of 2032 to 2034 mean the current phase is routing, permitting, detailed engineering and procurement of transformers, breakers and switchgear on lead times now measured in years. Field labor on these specific lines and stations does not peak until late in the decade. What is happening now is that a decade of work has been made bankable, which is what changes contractor backlog and apprenticeship intake before a single foundation is poured.

That distinction is worth holding onto. Rate-based transmission is the most durable backlog in the electrical industry right now precisely because it is approved, allocated and recoverable rather than speculative. Contractors staffing substation and industrial divisions, and electricians moving toward protection and control, commissioning and testing work, are positioning against a pipeline that regulators have already blessed. Illinois and Ohio locals sit directly on top of the segment FERC just cleared.

There is a cost side for the people who occupy commercial buildings, too. Approved transmission portfolios of this size are recovered through transmission rates, and facilities managers and property owners across the MISO and PJM footprints will see that line grow through the 2030s. The buildout is also what keeps power available for the industrial and data center customers reshaping those same markets.

The plan stopped being a study this month. Now it is a procurement schedule.