FERC-715, Annual Transmission Planning and Evaluation Report

The Energy Policy Act of 1992 provided the Commission authority with which it may mandate bulk power transmission owners to provide access to their transmission grids to third parties when requested. This allowed transmission systems to be more accessible to outside customers. In spite of the added accessibility, transmission owners retained a flexibility of service that transmission customers did not also receive. Moreover, timely permission to use the transmission grid did not occur since the Commission had to review requests on a case-by-case basis. To remedy these problems, the Commission issued Order No. 888 . Order No. 888 required utilities owning bulk power transmission facilities to treat any of their own wholesale and purchases of energy over their own transmission facilities under the same transmission tariffs they apply to others. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 further granted significant new responsibilities and authority to discharge these responsibilities by modifying the Federal Power Act (FPA), the Natural Gas Act, and the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA). These new responsibilities included (but not limited to): • Overseeing the reliability of the nation's electricity transmission grid; • Implementing new tolls (including penalty authority) to prevent market manipulation; • Providing rate incentives to promote electric transmission investment; • Supplementing state transmission siting efforts in national interest electric transmission corridors and; • Reviewing certain holding company mergers and acquisitions involving electric utility facilities as well as certain public utility acquisitions of generating facilities. FPA Section 213 requires each transmitting utility that operates integrated transmission system facilities rated above 100 kilovolts (kV) to submit annually: • Contact information for the FERC-715; • Base case power flow data (if it does not participate in the development and use of regional power flow data); • Transmission system maps and diagrams used by the respondent for transmission planning; • A detailed description of the transmission planning reliability criteria used to evaluate system performance for time frames and planning horizons used in regional and corporate planning; • A detailed description of the respondent's transmission planning assessment practices (including, but not limited to, how reliability criteria are applied and the steps taken in performing transmission planning studies); and • A detailed evaluation of the respondent's anticipated system performance as measured against its stated reliability criteria using its stated assessment practices.

The latest form for FERC-715, Annual Transmission Planning and Evaluation Report expires 2022-09-30 and can be found here.