In July 2026, the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity released a request for comments on their 2026 National Transmission Needs Study. CPE found the study incredibly valuable and chose to respond to it with a pre-publication draft of Down to the wire, the CPE Energy Program’s latest report on the need for federal leadership to coordinate interregional transmission planning.

Our submission contributes to our team’s work identifying barriers to bankability for large-scale energy infrastructure and describing how public financing and planning tools can break coordination bottlenecks for transmission in particular, with benefits for the interconnection of large loads and clean energy generation resources. This submission also follows on our response to the DOE’s “Accelerating Speed to Power” request for information last fall.

You can read Down to the wire here.