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Witnesses warn of unchecked supplemental transmission spending and urge oversight
Summary
Trade groups and energy counsel urged the House Energy Committee to close a regulatory gap that allows utilities' transmission affiliates to build supplemental projects with limited oversight, a practice witnesses said is driving rapid increases in transmission charges for large users.
Witnesses at the House Energy Committee hearing told lawmakers that supplemental transmission projects — often built at 69 kilovolts — have escaped thorough regulatory review and are driving large increases in transmission charges passed to customers.
David Perwanyo, regulatory counsel for the Ohio Energy Leadership Council, said the “regulatory gap” lets transmission-affiliate projects bypass the more rigorous PJM regional review and the Ohio Power Siting Board. Perwanyo told the committee that in 2022 AEP Ohio filed far more supplemental projects than baseline projects and that “in 2022 alone, AEP Ohio had 26,000,000 in baseline projects and almost 500,000,000 in supplemental projects, many of which were 69 kV with no review.”
Perwanyo and other witnesses urged the committee to give the Power Siting Board authority to review a wider set of transmission projects. He said his group tracked about 74 supplemental projects currently under construction in Ohio and that about 26 of those were 69 kV projects that receive little review. "Once you shine a light on costs and expenses, it's amazing how the utilities end up cutting how much they are asking the commission for," Perwanyo said.
Kim Boyko of the Ohio Manufacturers Association said transmission costs are rising “at a dangerous clip,” and urged more transparency. "Ohioans are paying about $1,000,000,000 per year for transmission improvements without proof that it is improving our system," she said.
Perwanyo presented illustrative demand-charge math to emphasize the impact on large industrial customers: using a hypothetical large user with 100,000 kW of demand, he showed transmission-related charge increases from 2017 to 2025 that, for some territories, would represent multi-million-dollar annual increases for a single large facility.
Witnesses asked the committee for statutory fixes that would require higher transparency, place supplemental projects under state siting review in more cases, and produce public “heat maps” showing available transmission and generation capacity. They warned that without such reforms the increases could deter new investment and relocation decisions by large energy users.
