US Grid Congestion Hit $17.1 Billion in 2025, Below the 2022 Peak, With PJM at $3.2 Billion

Transmission congestion cost the US grid an estimated $17.1 billion in 2025, up 39% from $12.3 billion in 2024. The figure comes from the annual congestion report Grid Strategies published this week. PJM carried the largest share at $3.17 billion. The 2025 figure is the second-highest in the report’s ten-year table, not the highest. That belongs to 2022, at $20.8 billion.

The Data

Seven RTOs reported $11.58 billion of congestion in 2025. PJM led at $3,174 million, followed by ERCOT at $2,499 million, SPP at $2,192 million and MISO at $2,054 million. CAISO reported $923 million, NYISO $681 million and ISO-NE $60 million.

SPP placing third is the result that does not match the coverage. At $2,192 million it ran ahead of MISO, a larger footprint, and its congestion has not dropped below $1.2 billion in any year since 2021.

Grid Strategies names three drivers for 2025. Transmission build has not kept pace with load growth and new generation. Extreme summer heat displaced extreme cold as the dominant weather factor. Natural gas, still the marginal fuel in many areas, widened the price gap between cheap and expensive parts of the grid.

Why It Matters

The trend claim in the report holds up better than the single-year number. Before 2021, annual congestion costs never passed $8 billion. Every year since has cleared $12 billion. Adjusted for inflation, the annual average went from about $9.2 billion across 2016-2020 to $16.1 billion across 2021-2025.

That is the number worth planning against. A floor that has doubled is a structural change in where power gets dispatched. A single year that jumps 39% and still sits below 2022 is mostly weather and gas.

For anyone siting load or storage, the regional split matters more than the national total. The PJM cost concentrates in moving cheap western power to East Coast demand. In ERCOT the pattern is two-sided. The Panhandle has low-cost wind it cannot export. The Permian Basin has import constraints and demand growth from data centers and oil and gas activity. Congestion in the ERCOT West zone, which contains it, rose 27% from 2024 to 2025.

The Gap

About a third of the headline number was never reported by a market monitor. The RTOs account for $11.58 billion. The national estimate is $17.09 billion. The $5.5 billion difference covers non-RTO regions. The report derives it by scaling known RTO costs on the peak load of those regions against total US load.

Grid Strategies states this openly in a footnote and in the appendix. It is a defensible method, because congestion is only transparent where an organized market publishes it. It also means the Southeast and much of the West enter the total as a ratio rather than a measurement. No reader of the headline learns which third is which.

The report also does not separate weather from structure inside the 2025 increase. It argues the elevated floor is structural, and the ten-year table supports that. It offers no estimate of how much of the $4.8 billion jump over 2024 reverses in a mild year with cheaper gas.

Critical Perspective

The RTO column is not apples to apples, and the report says so in its own footnotes. The NYISO figure covers day-ahead congestion only, because its market monitor does not report both day-ahead and real-time values in the annual state of the market report. The CAISO figure is a proxy, built by combining day-ahead congestion with real-time congestion imbalance offset charges, a method the report borrows from the Department of Energy’s 2023 National Transmission Needs Study. Two of the seven numbers in the table are constructed differently from the other five, and the total adds them anyway.

The trend framing also smooths a series that jumps around. Grid Strategies calls high congestion an emerging trend rather than a blip, and the elevated floor supports that. The same table shows the national figure falling 45% from $20.8 billion in 2022 to $11.5 billion in 2023, then climbing again. A reader funding a transmission line off this report is looking at a metric that rose $7.4 billion in one year and gave back $9.3 billion the next.

None of that makes the direction wrong. It does mean the precision in a figure like $17.1 billion is inherited from a table with a scaled third, two differently-built entries and a wide annual swing. The honest read is a range, and the report does not publish one.

Sources

• Grid Strategies – Transmission Congestion for 2025
• Grid Strategies – Transmission Congestion in the U.S.
• Latitude Media

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