Guide

U.S. electric utilities are entering one of the largest capital investment cycles in decades, driven by rising demand from AI, data centers, electric vehicles, and industrial growth, as well as the need to replace aging infrastructure and meet decarbonization targets. Capital plans built by generation, transmission, and distribution teams often lose coherence once they pass through corporate finance, where allocations, overheads, and earnings models reshape them in ways field teams don’t fully see or understand.

This guide covers the following key topics:

• The structural gap between departmental capital plans and corporate finance decisions.
• Why feedback loops between corporate finance and field teams break down, and how to rebuild them.
• How to keep capital plans synchronized with actuals as conditions change in real time.
• The case for a unified dataset across planning, finance, and execution.
• What institutional discipline looks like when capital planning becomes an enterprise capability.