Yesterday, DOE released its 2018 Annual U.S. Transmission Data Review, which gathers and presents, in a unified framework, data on the U.S. transmission system from the Energy Information Administration, Edison Electric Institute, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, and FERC. DOE explains in the report’s introduction that the agency “has broad responsibility for developing and supporting the implementation of energy policies that serve the public interest. Ensuring that timely and accurate data on key subjects is widely available to the public is one of those responsibilities.”
The Annual U.S. Transmission Data Review focuses on six topics:
- The amount of existing transmission infrastructure—the transmission lines, transformers, circuit breakers, capacitor banks, and other equipment that make up the transmission systems—as well as planned transmission construction and investment;
- The reliability performance of the transmission system in recent years;
- Transmission system utilization (i.e., how the transmission system as a whole is used in day-to-day operations to facilitate electricity flows);
- Management of current transmission constraints, defined as limitations on power flows resulting from individual pieces of equipment, operational limits, and transmission system capacity to deliver electricity from one area to another;
- Transmission congestion—when transmission constraints limit the ability of system users to transfer power in the amounts they desire—including the economic costs of congestion developed by individual market operators; and
- Transmission planning emerging from FERC-mandated regional transmission planning processes, as well as other, interconnection-wide planning activities.
