Dear FERC Commissioners: 

In our letter to you dated February 17, 2026, 105 organizations urged you to fully exercise your authority to reduce the cost of electricity transmission and increase affordability by unleashing competition to the largest extent possible in the regulated electric utility industry.[1] As we noted, such action is urgently needed now to ensure just and reasonable transmission rates. The request was consistent with President Trump’s campaign pledge to reduce electricity prices to improve energy affordability, his April 9, 2025 Executive Order “Reducing Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers”[2] and his January 20, 2025, Executive Order “Declaring a National Energy Emergency.”[3] The President’s Executive Orders highlight the need to achieve “a reliable, diversified, and affordable supply of energy” and to address “the high energy prices that devastate Americans, particularly those living on low- and fixed-incomes.” 

This letter is in response to the March 12, 2026 letter WIRES sent to you on behalf of its transmission owning members,[4] which requests that you ignore our letter and FERC’s Federal Power Act ratemaking responsibilities and protect their monopoly power aspirations to increase profitability. Without competition, an incumbent transmission monopoly has zero incentive to reduce costs.   

Under the guise that expanding competitive solicitations risks timely development of needed transmission and is inconsistent with national Speed-to-Power objectives, WIRES’ letter is an attack on the very foundation of the Federal Power Act, which first and foremost is a consumer protection statute that requires FERC to deliver just and reasonable transmission rates. WIRES also ignores the fact that immediate need reliability projects that are needed in three years or less are not subject to competition.  

WIRES’ self-serving letter reveals concerted, anti-competitive behavior among certain transmission owners and their surrogates. WIRES leadership includes companies that have a long-standing history of vigorously opposing the Commission’s requirements for transmission competition, including through advancing state “right of first refusal” laws that would prevent the incumbent electric utilities from having to compete to build new transmission projects and through misleading and refuted reports on the value of competition.[5]

The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) is on record opposing anticompetitive behavior and ROFRs in several court cases and state ROFR legislation. The DOJ has filed briefs in actions challenging the constitutionality of state ROFR laws.

In a March 24, 2025 letter to The Honorable Jesse Green in the Iowa Senate Iowa State Capitol, the DOJ writes:

Competition is a core organizing principle of the American economy, and vigorous competition in an open marketplace gives consumers the benefits of lower prices, increased access to higher quality goods and services, and greater innovation. The Division promotes competition by bringing cases to enforce the antitrust laws and through competition advocacy efforts that urge federal, state, and local government bodies to make decisions that benefit competition for the benefit of consumers.[6]

The monopoly incumbent electric utilities that are full members of WIRES are: AES, Ameren, American Electric Power, ATC, AVANGRID, Berkshire Hathaway, Con Edison Transmission, Dominion Energy, Duke, Energy, Eversource, Exelon, First Energy, Grid North, ITC, National Grid, PG&E, PPL, PSEG, Sunflower Electric Power Corporation and Xcel Energy.

The WIRES Letter would have you believe that:

• FERC should do nothing to increase electric transmission affordability.

• Incumbent utilities can build needed transmission faster than non-incumbent developers, despite producing no credible evidence to support such an assertion.

• Existing competitive solicitation processes cannot be expedited and FERC is powerless to direct the RTO/ISOs as needed to work with their stakeholders to streamline their processes and speed up their solicitation window timelines.

• Competitive transmission processes have yielded projects with cost containment measures that have resulted in no increased cost overrun or schedule protections for customers when credible evidence suggests otherwise (see Figure 1). Ten transmission projects with an average cost reduction of 34 percent (see Figure 2). Fifteen transmission projects that were not competitive with an average cost overrun of 89 percent.

• That transmission costs are not a significant cost to ratepayers (see Figure 3). Edison Electric Institute (EEI) transmission spending forecast for 2026, 2027, 2028 totals $137.7 billion. When up to ten FERC transmission incentives and financing costs are added, the actual amount ratepayers will pay quadruples to $550.8 billion or more over the life time of the project. All of these costs will be paid for by ratepayers. And this is only three years of spending! If competition reduces the initial costs by only 25 percent, the savings to ratepayers would be about $138 billion.

Finally, we bring to your attention a March 12, 2026 report entitled “Paying for Their Profits: How Ratepayers Foot the Bill for Soaring Utility Profits” that examined the profitability of 110 investor owned utilities, many of which are listed above. The report concludes that profit margins are increasing and that 13-15 percent of the ratepayer bill are utility profits.      

The relevant question is this: Will FERC continue to protect would-be transmission monopolists from competition or protect ratepayers? Respectfully, we have seen zero evidence to date that FERC will side with ratepayers. Accordingly, we urge you to make the hard, politically courageous decisions to do what it takes to increase electricity transmission affordability.        

Sincerely, 

Paul N. Cicio 

Chairman, Electricity Transmission Competition Coalition 

President, Industrial Energy Consumers of America