In May 2024, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued Order 1920, a landmark rule requiring long-term, proactive regional transmission planning to meet future energy needs. Key to Order 1920 is a requirement for benefit evaluation via seven metrics for candidate transmission solutions.

High-capacity transmission provides many benefits—including economic, reliability, and resilience benefits—but without proper evaluation of these benefits, cost-saving solutions to future system needs may be missed during the transmission planning process.

While Order 1920 provides requirements and basic guidelines for how to evaluate benefits, the devil is always in the details. Through a review of existing and proposed practices, this analysis identifies a set of best practices that would ensure that planners have all the tools they need to fully evaluate the array of transmission benefits and make informed decisions that provide the greatest impact to meet future system needs.

The key findings of the analysis are as follows:

• The required Order 1920 benefits are currently considered by some, but not all, regional planners in their existing near-term transmission evaluation processes.
• Even though many regional planners consider multiple metrics in benefits evaluation, they are not all aligned with Order 1920. Still, they can be used to determine best practices.
• There are many important modeling considerations that must be decided when establishing the full planning process. These choices will impact final benefits evaluation and selection.
• A review of best practices leads to several methods for evaluating the required Order 1920 benefits, outlined in the analysis.
• There are many challenges to good benefits evaluations. These challenges can be overcome if considered early when developing benefit evaluation methodologies.

This analysis was prepared in collaboration with Electric Power Engineers (EPE) for the Connected Grid Initiative. Please reach out if you would like a presentation of the report.

Click “View the Report” below to dive into the analysis’ key findings and proposed methodologies.

Sources and additional benefit metric details for each regional planner can be found in the accompanying spreadsheet: Download