Resources

The January 2025 NCEP State Framework for Successful Stakeholder Engagement outlines engagement stages, captures shared principles, presents replicable approaches, and identifies cross-agency benefits shared by NCEP members at the 2024 Annual Meeting. Learn more and download the framework.

NCEP serves as a forum for collaboration around grid-related topics at state, regional, and national levels. The NCEP mini guide series promotes dialogue among state electricity decision-makers by highlighting examples of successful engagement across NCEP members.

• Collaboration Brief: Partnerships between State Government Agencies and Higher Education Institutions to Support Recruitment (2024)
• Mini Guide on Air Quality Management Agency Engagement with State Energy Agencies (2024)
• Mini Guide on PUCs and the Investment Community: Opportunities for Engagement (2023)
• Mini Guide on Transportation Electrification: State-Level Roles and Collaboration among Public Utility Commissions, State Energy Offices, and Departments of Transportation (2022)
• Mini Guide on Engagement between States and Regional Transmission Organizations (2022)
• Mini Guide on Transmission Siting: State Agency Decision-Making (2022)
• Engagement between Public Utility Commissions and State Consumer Advocates (2021)
• Engagement between Public Utility Commissions and State Energy Officials (2020)
• Local Government Engagement with Public Utility Commissions (2019)
• State Agency Coordination During Energy-Related Emergencies (2019)
• Engagement between Public Utility Commissions and State Legislatures (2019)

Learn more

Terms and Concepts used by State Regulatory Commissions, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Regional Transmission Organizations / Independent System Operators, the Electric Industry, and the Natural Gas Industry. These include Reliability, Economic, Legal, Accounting, Engineering, Environmental, Statistical, and Financial Terms.

• View 2022 Glossary

The NCEP T&D Resource Catalog documents an ongoing conversation about the intersection and coordination of the transmission and distribution systems. The documents contained in the resource catalog provide state electricity system decision-makers with examples and resources to support their decision making. Learn more and download the T&D Resource Catalog.

NCEP and Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory, in partnership with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory, offered four virtual training sessions on innovations in electricity system modeling in October and November 2021.

• Introduction to Tools to Support Comprehensive Electricity Planning with experts from PNNL and LBNL
• State of the Art Practices for Modeling Storage in Integrated Resource Planning with experts from PNNL and LBNL
• Integrating DERs into Bulk Power System Planning with experts from LBNL
• Planning for Climate Variability with experts from PNNL, NREL, Northwest Power and Conservation Council, and RAND Corporation

Recordings and presentations are available.

• How Do States Affect the Deployment of Renewables? (2018)
  This conversation between Vermont Public Utility Commissioner Sarah Hofmann and former Director of NARUC’s Research Lab, Miles Keogh, goes into detail about how states can affect the deployment of renewable sources of energy. Commissioner Hofmann describes how Vermont, in addition to other states, is exploring the wide variety of renewable technologies available in the rapidly changing electricity marketplace. Also discussed is the lowering price of renewable energy and its effects on traditional sources of energy, how state legislators can assist and incentivize renewable deployment, concerns regarding over-reliance on renewables, and the pluses and minuses of net metering programs.
• Consumer Advocates and the Energy Sector (2018)
  In this podcast, National Council on Electricity Policy (NCEP) Director Jeannette Brinch is joined by Tanya McCloskey, Acting Consumer Advocate, Pennsylvania Office of Consumer Advocate, for a presentation on the role of the consumer advocate in the energy sector.
• The Evolving Electricity Marketplace – What State Legislators Want to Know (2017)
  Representative Tom Sloan from Kansas’ 45th District shares his insights on the changing electricity marketplace and the role of state legislators in supporting new policies, technological changes, and greater customer engagement in the way their electricity is generated, transmitted, and delivered.
• How Utilities Operate: A Regulator’s Perspective (2017)
  Commissioner Paul Kjellandar, President of the Idaho Public Utilities Commission, shares his knowledge – both as a regulator and former state legislator – of the premise behind utility regulation. The regulatory compact is based on a number of fundamental assumptions. In return for an obligation to serve customers and regulatory oversight, the utility has the opportunity to recover its prudently incurred expenses. Is this compact in danger of being upset? How does a state address a utility that spans multiple states?
• New Developments in Siting Energy Projects (2017)
  Chairman Ed Finley of the North Carolina Utility Commission addresses transmission siting challenges in today’s new electricity market. He shares his knowledge and expertise on how greater use of renewables and distributed energy resources, siting proposals from new transmission companies (other than incumbent utilities), and consumer concerns about siting transmission lines across their property are changing the traditional manner in which siting is done.
• Infrastructure and Cyber Security: State and Local Responsibilities (2017)
  Commissioner Nick Wagner of the Iowa Utilities Board explores the ways that states, utilities, and private and public sector organizations are dealing with cyber and infrastructure security. He shares his knowledge of the critical issues that state and local governments must address to ensure that their citizens are protected against cyber attacks and threats against energy infrastructure, now and in the future.

• Federal-State Jurisdictional Approaches to Emerging Electricity Technologies and Grid Modernization Opportunities for State Action, May 11, 2017
• Eastern Interconnection States Planning Council (EISPC)
  Eastern Interconnection public utility commissions and state energy directors met throughout 2010 to 2015 to discuss trends in transmission planning at the inter-regional level. This is an archive of the resources that EISPC developed with sponsorship from the U.S. Department of Energy. Learn more.