We’re in the early stages of an electricity boom. From renewables, to AI, to electric vehicles, the green transition’s most vital sectors all need electricity, and far more of it than ever before.
As these technologies expand, massive increases in power consumption across the country are exposing deep weaknesses in the grid, the sprawling network of thousands of power plants and some 500,000 miles of power cables that provide electricity to millions of homes and businesses across the country.
The grid’s magnitude is rivaled only by its complexity—It’s been called “the most complicated machine ever built.” It also isn’t one uniform, national system: The Lower 48 is divvied up by a patchwork of 10 independent operators, some of whom work with each other and some of whom don’t, which are governed by local, state, and federal laws all at once.
Most of the grid’s central infrastructure—the actual wires and electrical transformers that move electricity from point A to point B—is half a century old, and wholly unequipped to handle what’s shaping up to be a generational surge in power demand. Everyone’s playing catch-up.
“We’ve got a huge surge in demand for electricity coming,” Neil Chatterjee, the former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the federal agency that regulates electricity transmission and pricing, told Fortune. “In order to meet that demand, while maintaining reliability and affordability—and also while decarbonizing—we just need to build a lot more transmission. And it’s been too difficult to do.”
Transmission: The grid’s forgotten foundation
Even as flashy energy generation projects—including wind farms, solar arrays, and nuclear plants—have attracted over half a trillion dollars in the past three years, per White House estimates, there’s nothing even close to that amount of money allocated for the electrical plumbing that keeps the grid going.
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