Utility lobbying against BAAJA transmission reforms revealed
Oklahoma Gas & Electric, an investor-owned utility company, is lobbying Congress to make “substantial revisions” to the transmission reform sections of major energy legislation that Congress may consider after the election.
OG&E’s position is laid out in a lobbying document, obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute, that the utility is using with Congressional offices.
OG&E did not respond to a request for comment from EPI about the document.
The bill, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 (BAAJA), would enact major changes to how the transmission lines that carry electricity over long distances are planned, permitted, and paid for, as part of a broader overhaul of federal permitting of energy infrastructure.
Two senators from each party – Republicans Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee, and Democrats Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse – negotiated the legislation and unveiled it last month.
Despite the fact that utilities have supported many of the bill’s proposed permitting changes for years, utilities have been “gearing up for one last round of lobbying” on the bill to oppose its transmission reforms, according to reporting from Punchbowl News.
While most utilities build transmission lines, the regional and interregional lines which BAAJA’s reforms would benefit can also threaten utilities’ profitability. Long-distance, high-voltage lines, development of which has ground to a halt in recent years, create value by allowing cheaper power from one region to displace more expensive power plants in another region. So even if one utility company may get to profit by building a new transmission line, another utility may lose money from that same line, if the new line undercuts the value of the utility’s own plants.
A 2025 paper, Power Flows: Transmission Lines, Allocative Efficiency, and Corporate Profits, by Catherine Hausman, documented how better grid integration via transmission development would have cut the net revenues for two of Entergy’s subsidiaries by $850 million combined in just one year, 2022.
Aside from two utilities that offered support for the bill, American Electric Power and Berkshire Hathaway Energy, the major monopoly electric utilities have not taken public positions on the bill. Their trade association, the Edison Electric Institute, has said it is “reviewing” the transmission provisions.
OG&E says BAAJA transmission reforms override state authority
OG&E cast its opposition to the transmission reforms in BAAJA as a matter of preserving state authority over its practices and investments, calling those “matters that have traditionally been reserved to the states.”
The utility objected to BAAJA’s expansion of FERC’s “backstop” siting authority. Under current law, FERC can permit a transmission line that a state has rejected or has not decided on within a year, but only if the line sits inside a national interest corridor designated by the Department of Energy. BAAJA would drop the corridor requirement for lines of 230 kilovolts or more, and would require FERC to issue a permit for such lines that it finds are consistent with the public interest and will benefit consumers.
OG&E’s lobbying document says that those changes would undermine state regulatory authority.
Elsewhere, OG&E objects to one of BAAJA’s reforms that does appear to empower state regulators. Currently, many utilities are building plenty of local, lower-voltage transmission lines, which typically get less scrutiny than regional ones. Section 2104 of BAAJA would allow states to refer a utility’s local transmission planning to FERC for investigation by a team composed of FERC enforcement staff and up to three representatives appointed by the state . If the team found the utility wasn’t picking the more efficient or cost-effective local projects, or it found that the utility was interfering with regional planning, FERC could cut the profit rate the utility earns on those local lines, remove the presumption that the utility’s spending on them was prudent, and fine the utility up to $5 million for each line.
OG&E says that “Outside counsel has identified significant concerns with the breadth, structure, public nature, and potential consequences of this proposed process. Although a referral would be initiated by a state, the result would be to place local planning decisions, which have historically been overseen by state commissions, under federal investigation and federal penalties.”
Another section of BAAJA would require that FERC-regulated investor-owned utilities use “advanced transmission technologies”, including the best available conductor technology, when they build, upgrade, or rebuild transmission lines. The utilities would be further required to deploy the advanced technologies when benefits exceed costs according to cost-benefit analyses run by the utilities. Even with that utility-run cost-benefit test, OG&E calls these decisions “engineering and prudence judgments that state commissions and utilities are better positioned to make than a single federal standard.”
OG&E also says that it “strongly opposes eliminating federal or state ROFR [right of first refusal] protections.” A ROFR allows an incumbent utility, like OG&E, to claim the right to build a new transmission line in its service territory before a competing developer can. The company acknowledges that the bill does not expressly preempt state ROFR laws, but OG&E asks Congress to amend BAAJA to affirmatively preserve those laws. OG&E goes further, saying it “supports restoring a federal ROFR,” which FERC eliminated for regionally planned lines in FERC Order 1000.
OG&E lobbying fits into track record of utilities’ thwarting of transmission development
OG&E’s position against BAAJA’s transmission reforms fits into a pattern that EPI has documented of other monopoly utilities seeking to block transmission development when they perceive it as threatening their profits.
While facing a DOJ antitrust investigation into its alleged anti-competitive transmission practices, Entergy committed to join an RTO in 2011. After it joined MISO in 2013, MISO’s planning hours ballooned from 1,011 in 2014 to 5,844 in 2018.
Records obtained by EPI showed that a former 17-year Entergy executive presented himself at MISO meetings as a “MISO South customer.” An Entergy Mississippi employee wrote that he acted “on Entergy Mississippi’s behalf.”
Other records EPI obtained showed Entergy coordinating with Mississippi PSC staff and the PSC’s outside consultants as Mississippi led pushback on MISO’s long-range planning.
When MISO selected a competing developer, NextEra, to build a transmission line in East Texas, Entergy backed a ROFR law at the Legislature that blocked NextEra’s plans. That’s the type of state ROFR law OG&E is asking Congress to expressly preserve. A federal judge struck down the Texas law, ruling that the law discriminated against interstate commerce.
NextEra itself spent millions, and acted covertly, to block a transmission line to bring hydropower into New England that would have undercut the profitability of its power plants in the region. The utility contributed over $20 million to “Mainers for Local Power,” the group that spent $24.5 million in support of a 2021 ballot referendum to ban the line.
A state investigation later revealed that NextEra covertly funded “Stop the Corridor,” a group that backed an earlier version of the initiative and was later fined for failing to properly register as a ballot committee. NextEra also routed a $150,000 contribution through an apparent shell corporation to the Maine Democratic Party in 2018.
Southern Co. has opposed federal efforts to expand transmission development through an endless stream of regulatory advocacy. In 2018, the company responded to a planned DOE transmission congestion study by calling economic congestion “not particularly relevant” to the Southeastern electricity system, and urged DOE to refrain from designating National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors. At the time, a line had to be located inside one of those corridors to qualify for FERC’s limited permitting authority; BAAJA would eliminate this requirement.
Despite Southern’s objections, DOE earlier this year estimated the cost of congestion between the Southeastern Regional Transmission Planning (SERTP) region and its neighbors, finding an average value of $8.14/MWh from 2016 to 2023.
When FERC proposed what would become Order 1920 in 2022 to help improve transmission planning, Southern argued that “a minimum set of benefits should not be required.”
Southern also lobbied FERC for a federal reinstatement of the same Right of First Refusal that OG&E is attempting to restore.
Southern also has been a part of planning processes in its region, SERTP, that seem designed to fail. SERTP’s utilities studied three 500 kV lines in 2025. It dismissed all three because they didn’t replace a local project already planned by the utilities. That result is typical: SERTP’s transmission so-called planning process has never chosen a regional transmission line over its utilities’ local projects.
