Democratizing ISO Knowledge

By: 2025 Virtual PT/MT Fellow Justin Berg

Every day, when approximately 235 million Americans.) turn on a light, charge their phone, or reach into a grocery store freezer, they are depending on a system governed by wholesale electricity markets. In these regions, Independent System Operators and Regional Transmission Organizations manage the flow of electricity into homes and businesses. They operate the high-voltage grid, administer complex markets, and determine how resources are dispatched and integrated. As electricity demand accelerates due to data centers, industrial electrification, and organic load growth, understanding how these systems function is no longer a niche concern reserved only for those who work in energy. It is becoming a fundamental public issue, especially for anyone worried about rising electricity costs and the environmental consequences of future grid decisions.

Yet the work of ISOs remains difficult for most people to follow. The processes that shape power markets are highly technical, meetings are often inaccessible, and data is scattered across incompatible platforms. Policymakers, local governments, community organizations, and journalists regularly struggle to navigate an institutional landscape that directly influences reliability, affordability, and decarbonization outcomes. To meet the challenges of the coming decade, democratizing ISO knowledge is essential. Three steps would meaningfully improve transparency: universal access to meeting materials, coordinated public education, and modernized data tools.

Record and post public meetings in a centralized platform

Each ISO convenes extensive public stakeholder meetings to debate policy reforms, evaluate transmission needs, consider resource accreditation methods, and discuss emerging technologies. Although these meetings are technically open to all, attending them in real time is difficult for organizations with limited staff, and recordings and archived materials are inconsistent across the various ISOs.

A basic and overdue improvement is for each entity to record its public meetings, publish searchable transcripts, and provide accessible summaries using widely available, open-source language tooling. Making these materials available on a centralized, clearly organized platform would allow any user to revisit complex topics without devoting entire days to live attendance, and eliminate the possibility of needing to wait 5+ hours for specific topics to be brought up according to a posted agenda, only to have that topic be skipped entirely due to time mismanagement or overly verbose participants.

A shared “Initiative Tracker” would extend this transparency. Instead of navigating seven separate websites, users could compare how regions are approaching major issues such as large load interconnections, distributed energy resource participation, long-term transmission studies, energy storage resource integration, or resource adequacy changes. This would give policymakers and public interest organization advocates a clearer sense of regional trends and help highlight areas where collaboration or harmonization may be warranted, the unique benefits of one approach over another, as well as the historical precedence for how it was accomplished.

ISOs should jointly educate the public

Electricity markets are foundational to the country’s clean energy transition, yet their structure remains largely opaque to most Americans. Concepts such as locational marginal pricing or ancillary services are unfamiliar to the general public, and regional variation among the markets themselves further obscures understanding. Without clearer public education, the gap between those who make decisions and those who bear the consequences will continue to widen.

ISOs could narrow this gap by co-developing a shared public learning portal that provides consistent, accessible explanations of how wholesale markets operate. Instead of seven separately curated sets of materials, a unified platform would present clear explainers, short instructional videos, glossaries, and well-organized comparisons of each ISO’s rules. This approach would be especially effective for topics where ISOs must coordinate closely across borders, such as interties. And it would be similarly helpful for areas where they directly compete, exemplified by CAISO and SPP’s parallel efforts to build Western day-ahead markets.

The portal could integrate market design narratives describing capacity structures, large-load integration, and forecasting practices. Planning content could outline resource adequacy methods, transmission models, and interconnection timelines. Reliability sections could explain load-shed protocols, scarcity pricing, and winter preparedness. Policy material could track how each ISO treats distributed energy resources, storage, hybrid projects, data centers, and emerging technologies like hydrogen electrolyzers.

Providing these materials in one coherent place would significantly reduce the time required for the public, journalists, and policymakers to understand issues that influence affordability, reliability, and decarbonization. It would also enable state agencies to identify lessons from other regions more quickly and apply them more effectively.

ISOs should unify their data platforms

ISOs publish vast amounts of operational and market data, yet the information remains scattered across incompatible platforms. Some ISOs, like MISO, offer relatively advanced public tools including real-time emissions dashboards and accessible congestion summaries, while others rely on dense reports, manual downloads, or datasets that require specialized expertise to use. Interconnection queue information, emissions reporting, and congestion data vary widely in format and depth, a problem even FERC has acknowledged.

A unified approach would dramatically improve transparency. ISOs could adopt common layouts, shared definitions, and intuitive dashboards that display consistent metrics such as system load, renewable output, emissions intensity, and congestion patterns. Cleaned and standardized datasets designed for public use, covering emissions, renewable generation, and interconnection activity, would further lower barriers for policymakers, researchers, and community groups.

By modernizing and harmonizing their data tools, ISOs would strengthen public trust and enable clearer cross-regional understanding at a moment of rapid grid transformation.

The United States faces immense challenges in maintaining reliability, controlling electricity costs, and accelerating the clean energy transition. ISOs are central to each of these objectives, yet the information that underpins their decisions remains too difficult for the public to access. By recording meetings, collaborating on shared educational materials, and modernizing the way data is published, ISOs can make their work more transparent and equip the public with the knowledge necessary to engage in energy policy debates. In a period defined by rapid load growth and transformative technological change, democratizing ISO knowledge is not simply an improvement over the status-quo. It is a necessity.