Plans to expand the grid are finally underway. Will Trump drop the ball?

The U.S. transmission grid isn’t growing fast enough to meet the country’s skyrocketing demand for power. That’s making electricity more expensive and less reliable — and it may prevent new data centers and factories from getting the electricity they will need.

Still, major federal transmission policy initiatives launched under the Biden administration could give the country a fighting chance to build a bigger, better grid. Now, the question is whether a Republican trifecta in Washington will help or hinder that progress — and how the utilities, state regulators, and private-sector players will weigh in on those decisions.

Don’t expect clean energy to be at the forefront of these discussions. For the past four years, transmission advocates have focused on the need to double or triple the size of the U.S. high-voltage transmission network to enable a massive expansion of wind and solar power, because that’s what is necessary to meet the Biden administration’s goal of cutting power-sector emissions in half by 2030.

Donald Trump is hostile to that clean energy agenda, as are many Republicans in Congress and in state government.

But transmission gridlock isn’t just hampering the development of wind and solar. The parts of the country where data centers and semiconductor and cleantech factories are springing up the fastest are now struggling with inadequate grid capacity.

And large-scale grid outages due to extreme weather, most recently during major winter storms in Texas in 2021 and across the U.S. Southeast in 2022, have galvanized regulators to address the lack of grid capacity that exacerbated those emergencies.

In short, ​“economic growth simply can’t exist without improvements to our power grids,” said Tyler Duvelius, director of external affairs for the Conservative Energy Network, a network of 24 conservative state organizations that support clean energy innovation.

Speaking at a December webinar hosted by trade group Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG), Duvelius cited the central role that the transmission grid must play in achieving U.S. ​“energy dominance” — Trump’s favored term of art for his future administration’s energy policy objectives.

“We can’t achieve energy dominance in this country if we can’t get power to where it needs to go,” he said. ​“That’s why there’s a lot of bipartisan agreement around the need for transmission, whether it’s permitting reform or transmission modernization. The power grid doesn’t care about where the electrons come from. It just needs electrons.”

What got done in 2024

That’s not to say that bigger grid projects aren’t getting built today. Grid operators have initiated a flurry of grid expansion plans in the last few years, and some progress has also been made on long-range independently developed transmission lines that have been more than a decade in the making.

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, whose territory includes all or part of 15 U.S. states and Canada’s Manitoba province, has the most ambitious plans. In 2022, it approved $10.3 billion in transmission projects. And in December, it greenlit a round of $21.8 billion in high-voltage transmission lines — the biggest single grid investment being planned in the country.

Other major buildouts are on the drawing boards. Southwest Power Pool, a grid operator serving 14 Midwest and Great Plains states, approved $7.7 billion in transmission projects in October. And PJM, which manages the power grid serving Washington, D.C., and 13 states stretching from the mid-Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes, just finalized a regional transmission portfolio including $5.8 billion in new high-voltage transmission lines that the grid operator could vote to approve sometime in the first quarter of 2025.

Still more is happening within individual states. Texas regulators in September approved a grid reliability plan that could lead to roughly $13 billion in transmission investments. California’s grid operator OK’d $7.3 billion in projects in 2023 and $6.1 billion more in 2024. And New York regulators have approved two large-scale transmission projects worth a collective $5.7 billion — although one of those was recently canceled due to rising costs and lagging buildout of the clean energy it was meant to transmit.

In the past two years, several large-scale merchant transmission projects — power lines built by independent developers to connect new or yet-unbuilt generation to utilities and power customers — have reached milestones that will allow them to begin construction. Those include the $3 billion TransWest Express line from Wyoming to California, the $5 billion SunZia Southwest project from New Mexico to Arizona, and the $7 billion Grain Belt Express project, which has won regulator approval and federal backing to begin building its first stage from Kansas to the Missouri-Illinois border.

While important, these steps are not nearly sufficient. A 2023 report from consultancy Grid Strategies tallied an estimated $64 billion in large-scale transmission projects being built across the country. But that will expand U.S. transmission capacity by only about 15 percent, the report found.

What FERC has accomplished — and what’s ahead 

Scaling the grid up to a size that can meet the country’s needs will take significant changes in policy — a challenge that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has taken up in earnest.

Over the past four years, FERC, which is the federal agency primarily responsible for setting nationwide transmission policy, has launched and passed some of the most consequential reforms in more than a decade.

The most significant of these has been FERC Order 1920, a ​“landmark” decision passed in May, which ordered all U.S. grid operators and utilities to develop 20-year grid-expansion plans that improve reliability and support economic and state policy goals. Typically, utilities focus on smaller transmission projects within their own service territories that can more reliably earn them profits. But those tactics have driven up transmission costs for utility customers and forestalled the kinds of long-range and strategic grid buildouts that experts say can deliver cleaner and cheaper power to wider parts of the country at lower overall costs.

Building energy infrastructure has traditionally been a bipartisan priority, Richard Glick, the former FERC chair who launched the agency’s primary transmission-reform efforts under the Biden administration, reminded listeners during a December webinar hosted by nonprofit World Resources Institute. But ​“over the last couple years, transmission has become more of a partisan issue,” he said. Republican-led states have spent the past two years pledging to challenge Order 1920 in court, describing it as an attempt by FERC to force them to pay for transmission projects primarily benefiting Democratic-led states with clean energy mandates.

Mark Christie, the only Republican at FERC last spring, also opposed Order 1920 and voted against the policy, calling it ​“a pretext to enact a sweeping policy agenda that Congress never passed.” But Christie has since changed his view — or, more precisely, the order has changed in ways that have now won his support, namely, by giving state regulators more power to shape regional grid planning.

This will ​“give the states a much bigger toolbox containing far more effective tools they can use to protect their consumers and the interests of their states,” Christie wrote in a November statement explaining his decision to join FERC’s three Democratic members to unanimously approve Order 1920-A. (The commission’s other Republican, former West Virginia Solicitor General Lindsay See, abstained from the vote.)

FERC Order 1920-A could still be challenged in court, and recent Supreme Court decisions undermining federal agency authority could increase the chance of overturning it. But with both Republican- and Democratic-led states facing similar load-growth and grid-reliability problems, industry watchers suspect that states may be less inclined to seek to undermine a rule that could help solve those problems.

“The unanimous, bipartisan regional planning rule from FERC emphasized planning for what’s needed for economics and reliability,” Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, said during a December webinar. And given the huge growth in electricity demand coming over the next five years, ​“there seems to be a lot more interest in support for getting busy right now on long-term planning.”

Permitting reform — a long, hard slog 

Getting utilities, states, and regulators to agree is only part of the challenge of building new transmission, however. Siting and permitting projects that cross federal, state, and local jurisdictions and require negotiations with hundreds of private landowners is another major hurdle.

Despite years of lobbying from transmission-friendly groups and extensive negotiations over a series of permitting-reform packages, Congress has so far failed to deliver legislation that would give federal agencies like FERC and the Department of Energy more authority to push through transmission lines deemed critical for the nation.

The bipartisan permitting bill introduced by Senator Joe Manchin, the retiring West Virginia Democrat, and Senator John Barrasso, Republican from Wyoming, is the latest failure on this front. Some environmental groups opposed the bill’s provisions to streamline permitting for fossil-fuel projects. But other clean power groups and energy analysts said that the bill’s provisions to unblock clean energy and transmission development were worth the trade-off on fossil fuels.

One key part of the Manchin-Barrasso bill backed by pro-transmission groups was a provision that would allow FERC to require the country’s primary regional grid zones to build transmission lines that enable them to share more power. Utilities, states, and regional grid operators have had a very hard time finding consensus on building these kinds of interregional transmission links, but studies from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and the North American Electric Reliability Corp., among others, have shown that they’re vital for making grid power cheaper and more reliable.

One of the most recent reports, the DOE’s National Transmission Planning Study, found that expanding interregional transmission capacity to connect the country’s now largely balkanized regional grids could yield significant benefits that far outweigh the costs over the long haul. Compared with a business-as-usual grid buildout, high-voltage and direct-current transmission lines linking regions could ​“save the United States somewhere between $270 and $490 billion through 2050, with about $1.60 to $1.80 in system cost savings for every dollar spent,” Maria Robinson, head of DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, said in an October webinar introducing the study.

Another important — but far more fraught — power the Manchin-Barrasso bill would have given FERC is the ability to invoke so-called backstop siting authority to approve transmission projects that fail to win approval at the state level. Today, this kind of federal power can be used only where DOE has designated ​“National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors,” or NIETCs.

In May, the Biden administration announced 10 preliminary NIETC designations — swaths of land where federal agencies could override state, local, and private-sector opposition to site and permit transmission projects. But that’s a laborious process, and past attempts to use the NIETC designation have been thwarted by legal challenges. FERC approved an order in May that laid the groundwork for this backstop siting authority. But the Manchin-Barrasso bill would have strengthened FERC’s legal standing.

It’s far from clear how permitting reform will take shape in Congress this year. The Manchin-Barrasso bill represented a compromise between Republicans, who want to speed fossil-fuel development, and Democrats, who want to expand and streamline permitting for clean power and transmission infrastructure. It’s unlikely that a bill designed to pass a Republican-controlled Congress would include Democratic priorities.

Just how the federal government could help speed up the grid buildout is hard to predict, given how many other complications can stymie transmission projects. But Gramlich of Grid Strategies estimated that long-range, high-voltage transmission expansions of the type that multiple studies have shown will be most impactful in lowering costs and improving grid reliability are likely to ​“take 10 years without any permitting reform, and maybe half that with good permitting reform.”

Grid-enhancing technologies for the quick win

Even with all the right policies in place, it will still take years to a decade or more to yield real-world impacts. What can policymakers do in the meantime to help solve the country’s grid problems?

“Grid-enhancing technologies” could step in to fill the gap — if federal and state policymakers and regulators can set up the structures to encourage, or require, transmission operators and utilities to use them.

Grid-enhancing technologies — GETs for short — include hardware and software like dynamic-line-rating systems, topology optimization, advanced power-flow modeling, and advanced power-flow controllers that can find and take advantage of excess capacity in transmission grids to get more value out of the systems we already have. And advanced conductors — next-generation power cables that can transmit more power than standard power lines — could also significantly expand the capacity of existing transmission towers and pathways.

Multiple studies have shown that GETs can unlock billions of dollars in cost reductions and speed up the interconnection of gigawatts of power projects now stuck in interconnection queues at much lower cost than traditional grid upgrades. In April, DOE issued a plan to build a dozen or so pilot projects using these technologies in the next few years to standardize their deployment across the broader grid.

“We need to mandate a whole bunch of stuff really fast,” former FERC Commissioner Allison Clements said during a November webinar hosted by ACEG. Compared with traditional transmission projects, GETs are ​“cheap, and it should be a prerequisite to being able to spend lots of money on bigger investments.”

But GETs don’t necessarily align with utility incentives. Most U.S. utilities earn a regulated profit on the capital investments they make on their grids and power plants. Because GETS are cheaper than those investments, they’re a threat to utilities’ bottom lines. That’s why, ​“if we can’t mandate it, we should figure out ways to align incentives to get it done,” Clements added.

The work to incentivize utilities to use GETs is only starting to come together, however. FERC did require utilities and grid operators to consider GETs as part of long-range transmission planning in Order 1920, as well as in its Order 2023 grid-interconnection reform package approved last year. But those provisions leave wiggle room for utilities to avoid comprehensive efforts to discover where GETs could save money and time compared with more capital-intensive projects.

In fact, right now, the biggest boost to deploying GETs has been federal funding. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided billions of dollars of grid-modernization incentives that the DOE has been doling out over the past two years, including for projects involving GETs and advanced conductors.

Will the federal government be committed to expanding the grid? 

What role the Trump administration will choose to play in efforts to expand the transmission grid is still unknown. But if the administration follows through on plans laid out in Project 2025, the policy platform created by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, the prospects for grid expansion dim significantly.

Among the DOE programs and offices Project 2025 targets to be ​“eliminated or reformed” is the Grid Deployment Office (GDO), which is responsible for more than $22 billion in new appropriations created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The blueprint calls for eliminating any GDO programs not focused on ​“grid reliability” and states that ​“Congress should rescind any money not already spent.”

DOE has awarded billions of dollars to transmission expansion projects, including large-scale interconnections across the Midwest and high-voltage direct current lines connecting the Eastern and Western U.S. grids between Montana and North Dakota. It’s also issued nearly all of its $2.5 billion in lending authority to transmission projects from the Southwest to New England, providing crucial upfront financing investment that will be paid back as those projects secure buyers for the power they deliver.

Trump has said he doesn’t support Project 2025, but at least 140 people who worked in the prior Trump administration were involved in the project, including six of his former Cabinet secretaries. Bernard McNamee, the author of Project 2025’s recommendations for DOE and a DOE official and FERC commissioner during the first Trump administration, calls for eliminating DOE’s grid-planning work, lumping it in with a broader set of DOE climate initiatives that he claims will ​“require trillions of dollars in new investment, supported with taxpayer subsidies, to address a ​‘problem’ that government and special interests themselves created.”

Nor can the incoming administration be expected to support interregional grid expansion. Under the first Trump administration, a groundbreaking study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on the high value of interregional transmission expansion was buried as part of a widespread effort to suppress federal research that could be seen as supporting renewable energy.

Stymieing grid planning could allow existing fossil-fueled power plants to continue reaping higher financial rewards by preventing lower-cost wind and solar resources from replacing them.

But that gridlock also works against the goals of improving grid reliability during extreme weather events and lowering costs for everyday households and large industrial customers alike.

That tension is likely to ​“bubble up as one of the main political issues” in the next four years, Chris Seiple, vice chairman of the Power & Renewables group of energy analysis firm Wood Mackenzie, said during a December webinar hosted by law firm Norton Rose Fulbright.

“How are we going to get all this load connected?” Seiple asked. ​“This is at the center of economic growth and national security priorities.”