America’s electricity grid is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Power demand is growing for the first time in decades as new load comes online from a manufacturing renaissance powered by the Inflation Reduction Act, surging data center usage driven by AI, and electrification of vehicles and buildings.
Meanwhile we’re living through the hottest years in recorded history and suffering from extreme weather impacts, both caused by the fossil fuels worsening climate change.
Thousands of gigawatts worth of new clean energy projects have been proposed to meet this demand, but they are stuck waiting to connect to the grid, unable to come online without expensive, and time-consuming transmission system upgrades.
Without that new clean energy generation, utilities often choose to keep dirty coal plants online or propose new gas plants to meet expected demand, worsening air pollution and accelerating climate change.
The United States must expand and strengthen our grid, but we’re only expanding our transmission capacity at a rate of less than 1% per year, far below the 4-7% expansion grid experts including the U.S. Department of Energy say we need. New transmission lines can take up to 10 years to come online, and long-distance power lines can take even longer.
But what if a short-term fix to America’s grid problems is hiding in plain sight?
New research from Energy Innovation, GridLab, and the University of California-Berkeley shows reconductoring existing transmission lines with advanced conductors can double capacity on existing rights-of-way in just 18 to 36 months and help reach the country’s 90 percent clean energy goal.
This technology could save consumers $85 billion, quadrupling current rates of transmission capacity expansion, and hit 90 percent clean energy, all by 2035.
Reconductoring Could Solve Our Short-Term Grid Challenges
Reconductoring is the utility industry term for re-stringing existing transmission towers with new cables, without having to permit and build expensive new transmission towers and power lines. Advanced conductors are a modern, commercialized technology that use composite cores instead of steel, making them stronger and lighter, and denser annealed aluminum for conductors instead of aluminum strands, increasing capacity up to 2x.
Reconductoring with advanced conductors has been used by multiple utilities in the U.S. and across the globe.
Nevada’s NV Energy installed 125 miles of advanced conductors across 25 lines and has planned another 18 projects, increasing capacity along existing transmission corridors and making room for expected rapid load growth. Southern California Edison used this approach to reduce wildfire risks, cut costs, and double capacity along its Big Creek transmission corridor.
Neither is a new development.
In 2005 Minnesota’s Excel Energy used reconductoring to add more electricity supplies to Minneapolis-St. Paul, crossing multiple highways and environmentally sensitive areas. By using reconductoring, the project was approved in 30 days and completed in eight weeks, doubling the existing transmission lines’ capacity, and avoiding a major permitting effort that could have delayed the project or added extra costs.
If reconductoring existing transmission lines with higher-performance wires is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to add capacity to the existing grid without massive new construction projects, why aren’t more utilities taking advantage of this opportunity to expand the grid and bring more clean power online? And why are utilities still choosing technology that’s more than 100 years old?
Three major barriers stand in the way.
First, advanced reconductoring is a lower capital investment than new transmission lines, which means utilities that earn a return on total investment can earn more by building new grid projects. Complicating this picture, some regulators may be actively hostile to the technology. Because these wires are costlier than traditional materials, regulators may view them as unnecessary “gold plating” expenditures.
Second, utilities can be short-sighted when it comes to planning the grid for a future resource mix. Uncertainty about the rate of demand growth and cost of future technologies may make ambitious efforts to “future proof” the grid for a high-renewable, high-demand future seem risky to utilities and their regulators, even with clear long-term benefits like cutting emissions and cheap renewables and storage. Utilities and their regulators also may not be encouraged to evaluate benefits like greater transmission efficiency and wildfire resilience from advanced conductors.
Third, many utilities and regulators don’t have experience working with advanced conductors. That creates misconceptions the technology is unsafe or, leading some utilities to take a “piloting” mindset despite utilities around the world having used advanced conductors successfully for about two decades.
Policy Solutions Can Make Advanced Reconductoring A Reality
So where do we go from here? As with most energy challenges, smart policy can unlock smart solutions.
A combination of federal and state government policy, as well as new approaches to utility regulation and grid operation can help harness this high-potential technology.
The federal government and U.S. Congress should provide funding support for grid modernization and expansion efforts, industry collaboration, and training for utilities to work with advanced conductors, beyond the funds allocated in the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act.
For example, the IIJA’s Grid Innovation and Resilience Partnerships Program could scale up to provide matching grants and low-cost financing for many more projects, building on its success to date.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s pending rule on regional transmission planning will help drive consideration of technologies like advanced conductors to increase capacity along rights of way, but successful implementation of the rule depends on utilities and state regulators.
That’s unlikely in regions like the Southeast and West where monopoly utilities control information about transmission benefits. FERC can enable full consideration of transmission benefits by creating independent transmission monitors to objectively review investments by monopoly transmission owners to encourage advanced reconductoring.
At the state level, governors’ offices and state legislators can fill in some of the funding gaps left between federal support and utility needs. State legislatures can help approve transmission line proposals, and state utility regulators can explore the benefits of advanced reconductoring to utilities can rest assured their investments will be allowed under conditions in which the benefits are clear. And state agencies can help encourage education on the technology and workforce training for utilities and unions on how to work with this technology.
Which Way Toward America’s Grid Future?
Reconductoring with advanced conductors is not a panacea to our grid woes. The U.S. must increase its grid expansion and modernization efforts to connect clean energy to the consumers who need it, but the technology is less applicable building resilience and tapping clean energy’s potential by expanding long-distance transmission between regions.
And our grid must become more resilient to the looming threat of extreme weather by hardening infrastructure and connecting various regional grids together to balance supply and demand.
But advanced reconductoring’s short-term benefits are far too large to ignore. We can dramatically expand our existing grid’s capacity, save utility consumers billions, fight climate change and clean our air by bringing massive amounts of clean energy online, and help keep the lights on during extreme weather.
If we get it right, advanced reconductoring can protect consumers and the climate. But if we get it wrong, we risk failing to expand our grid fast enough to meet expected demand growth and our climate goals, with billions in unnecessary costs from uneconomic fossil fuels falling on electricity customers.
