Catalyst N° 087 of 125 20 Nov 2025
Looking for a turnaround in transmission
with Rob Gramlich, founder and president, Grid Strategies
In this note
The question
A year after a bleak assessment of US transmission, has anything actually turned around?
The answer
Not in construction, and the one number that looks like a turnaround is not one. Miles of new high-voltage line rose from 55 in 2023 to roughly 880 in 2024, but Gramlich says those were projects started ten to fifteen years ago finally finishing. What has genuinely changed is upstream and unproven: four regions are planning the highest-voltage AC lines in decades, while every policy piece that would carry them is still unsettled.
03The argument
The reason to ask the question again is that enormous money arrived in the electricity sector over the past year, chasing power for data centers, and in other parts of the system that money moved things fast. Transmission did not get the benefit. Gramlich’s opening answer is that the pieces are still not together. He thinks the policy platform that exists has a decent shot at surviving the change of administration precisely because transmission matters so much to AI-driven demand, but he will not say more than that, because things are only now settling at the relevant agencies in Washington.
The mileage numbers are where a reader has to be careful, because they look like evidence of a recovery and are not. In 2023 the country built 55 miles of new high-voltage transmission, against roughly 4,000 built ten years earlier. The 2024 figure came in around 880 miles, and Gramlich says his own first reaction was that things were turning around. Looking closer changed that reading: these were lines begun a decade or more ago that happened to finish, several of them after federal permits granted under the previous administration. That is a fact about permitting throughput in the past, not about the pipeline ahead, and Gramlich says plainly that he does not know whether the permitting behavior continues. So the forward-looking case has to rest on what is being planned rather than on what is being energized.
Why doesn’t the data center money solve it? Shayle puts the obvious version directly: you would expect a hyperscaler to buy a faster interconnection by paying for a hundred miles of new 765-kilovolt line. Gramlich’s answer is that transmission is background infrastructure rather than anyone’s immediate need, and that it does not attract attention the way on-site generation options do. He is careful not to say the buyers do not want it. His understanding is that hyperscalers and data center developers very much want full network transmission service, with the backup and the very high reliability that only the network provides. The problem is that these companies compete so intensely that, by his account, people inside a hyperscaler often do not know which data centers their own firm is developing, and none of them can capture the benefit of a network their rivals use equally. Shayle names this a tragedy of the commons and Gramlich agrees without qualification, drawing the conclusion that a public good of this kind needs federal leadership, which he frames around an AI race with China.
That leaves a turnaround that would have to show up first in planning documents, and it partly does. SPP has approval for a 765-kilovolt backbone, and MISO, PJM and ERCOT all now have 765-kilovolt plans, which Gramlich says is four regions working at the highest AC voltage available for the first time in many decades. Against that, every conditional is still open. The FERC order requiring long-term regional planning now moves to compliance filings, where FERC can insist on substance or accept weak plans and leave the rule a dead letter; Gramlich thinks it should survive a partisan turnover because it was bipartisan and technology-neutral, and then says twice that nobody knows yet. Interregional transmission, which he calls a massive untapped value, has no planning organization and no process at all. Permitting reform would matter a great deal and has not happened. The honest summary of his forward look is that a lot of projects are on their way and looking promising, which is a claim about plans and permits rather than about steel in the ground.
04What you need to know first
- High-voltage transmission and 765 kilovolts
- The long-distance backbone of the grid, not local distribution. 765 kilovolts is the highest alternating-current voltage class in US use, and the mileage figures in this episode count new lines of this general class.
- Order 1920
- The FERC order, issued a few years before the recording, requiring each region to do proactive twenty-year transmission planning. It binds the grid operators (Gramlich names PJM, MISO, SPP and California ISO) and also utilities outside those markets, which must plan with their neighbors. Regions file their compliance approaches with FERC, and FERC’s response is what decides whether the rule has teeth.
- Interregional transmission
- Lines between regions rather than within one, for example MISO to SPP or the interior West to the coast. No regional organization’s planning process covers it, which is why Gramlich treats it as the largest untapped opportunity.
- Reconductoring and grid-enhancing technologies
- Ways to get more out of existing corridors: hanging higher-performance conductors on existing or rebuilt towers, which avoids needing a new right of way, plus operational tools such as dynamic line rating, topology optimization and advanced power flow control. Fast and relatively cheap. They add headroom on a congested grid; Gramlich is explicit that they do not remove the need for new lines.
05Details worth keeping
- The Secretary of Energy sent FERC a letter putting a rulemaking on grid access before it, using authority Gramlich says is almost never exercised and accepting a fight with state regulators who would lose jurisdiction. Shayle points out that it contains nothing about building transmission. Gramlich’s argument is inferential: an administration willing to spend that much capital on access must care about capacity, because access to a grid with no room is worth little.
- The Department of Energy’s loan programs office cancelled a loan guarantee for a long-distance line the transcript calls the Greenbelt Express, and later renders as “grain belt.” Many people read the cancellation as indifference to transmission. Gramlich does not: he attributes it to a senator spending Oval Office time on one specific loan, calls that a rare event, and expects the project itself to proceed without the loan.
- California ISO is the exception that has built continuously for years, quietly bringing in resources from around the West.
- Other live projects: MISO’s long range plan, begun five to seven years ago and facing a challenge at FERC from some states; new lines in New York; and a line from Quebec into New England, named in the transcript as the NECEC, finally moving after court decisions and opposition.
- Merchant developers, of whom Gramlich names Grid United under Mike Skelly and Invenergy, assemble projects by passing the hat to utilities along the route for voluntary subscriptions. He credits their route-finding and landowner work and says several are well advanced, while stating the model cannot build anywhere near the optimal amount.
- The permitting bill he points to is the Manchin-Barrasso energy permitting act from a couple of years earlier, whose transmission title covers interregional planning, defining the benefits that justify cost allocation, and a federal permitting role. He expects the House to move first on the environmental-review piece.
- “Speed to power” is the Washington mantra, which is why the fast, cheap operational technologies get a hearing even though they are partial fixes.
06Claims worth citing
All figures as stated on 2025-11-20. Mileage and project-cost numbers here are recalled conversationally and several are explicitly uncertain.
- 55 miles of new high-voltage transmission built in 2023. Gramlich
- Roughly 4,000 miles built “ten years prior.” He uses this both as the contrast to 2023 and as proof the country can build under current permitting rules. He does not say whether 4,000 is a single year’s build or a multi-year total, so it should not be quoted as an annual rate. Gramlich
- An uptick to “880-ish” miles in 2024, which he attributes to projects begun ten to fifteen years earlier reaching completion. Gramlich
- SPP’s approved 765-kilovolt plan: Shayle says he read a figure around $8.6 billion; Gramlich says he does not know the final number and thinks it landed closer to the $10 billion version than the $20 billion version. Best treated as a range rather than a point estimate. Kann and Gramlich
- Four regions, SPP, MISO, PJM and ERCOT, now have 765-kilovolt plans, which he calls the first time in many decades that this many regions have planned at the highest AC voltage. Gramlich
- The Manchin-Barrasso permitting bill cleared the Senate Energy Committee 11 to 4, with one Republican opposed, the same senator Gramlich credits with the loan cancellation. Gramlich
- Order 1920 requires twenty-year plans for each region. Gramlich
07Where it’s contested
- Whether there is a turnaround at all. This is the title’s premise, and the guest does not confirm it for construction. His language throughout is conditional: still struggling to put the pieces together, a decent shot, we don’t really know yet, might not continue, hopefully. The concrete improvement he identifies is in planning and in some federal permitting, not in lines being built.
- The “few thousand miles a year” figure belongs to the host. Shayle says the curve may bend back up and that the country could be building hundreds or thousands of miles a year. Gramlich begins “yeah, we could be getting into a” and Shayle completes the sentence with “few thousand or more miles per year” before moving on to the next question. Gramlich never states a forward annual number himself, and his assent is to an interrupted sentence. The figure should not be attributed to him.
- Order 1920’s survival is an expectation, not a finding. He argues it should be robust to new commissioners because it was bipartisan and had no preference for renewables, then says the commissioners’ intentions are unknown and that FERC can weaken it at the margin through how it treats compliance filings. He also hopes challengers withdraw their court cases.
- His reading of the cancelled loan is a minority one and he says so. He acknowledges that many people interpret it as the administration not caring about transmission, and offers a one-off political explanation rather than evidence.
- The inference from the grid-access rulemaking is his own. The letter concerns access, not expansion, as Shayle points out. Gramlich reasons from it to a conclusion about the administration’s priorities and then says the next step, actually expanding the grid, still has to happen.
- Permitting reform. Shayle says it is not clear to him that it is on the horizon. The transcript garbles this exchange, running “Do we need it? I do think we need it” into the host’s turn where the answer reads as the guest’s. On the following turn Gramlich makes the substantive case: you can build things here and there under the current regime, as the country proved ten years ago, but there are real limitations, particularly interregional. He puts the prospect no higher than a chance.
- Advanced technologies are a partial answer by his own account. Faster and cheaper, and they add headroom, but he says explicitly that they do not remove the need for new transmission.