Ohio’s ratepayer advocate has been waiting since September 2023 for FERC to answer a complaint, and in the meantime the thing it complained about got three years bigger. Utilities in the state (AEP, FirstEnergy, AES, Duke) have piled more than $4.3 billion of “local transmission and supplemental projects” into PJM’s regional plan since the complaint was filed. By the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel’s account, not one dollar of it has been reviewed by any regulator for necessity or cost.

I keep turning over how much work the word “local” is doing here. Big multi-state transmission lines get bid out competitively and fought over in dockets, and this month alone FERC and MISO and SPP have all been busy tuning that apparatus: approving topology optimization here, cost recovery plans there. But relabel a project “local” or “supplemental” and it seems to walk straight past the whole system into the rate base, no questions asked. Not because anyone decided oversight didn’t matter. Because nobody built the door for FERC to walk through, and three years later nobody seems in a hurry to build one.

It’s the kind of gap that doesn’t announce itself. No single bad actor, no headline event, just a category boundary sitting exactly where the audit isn’t looking, quietly absorbing billions while everyone’s attention is on batteries and data centers and gas turbine backlogs. Somewhere there’s a spreadsheet where “local” means “under a hundred million” and somewhere else it apparently means whatever a utility needs it to mean this quarter.

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