A Roadmap for Advanced Transmission Technology Adoption
Brian Deese, Rob Gramlich, and Anna Pasnau
September 2024
Meeting rising demand for electricity and accomplishing U.S. clean energy deployment goals will require building new electricity generation facilities and expanding the capacity of the electric grid. However, transmission construction has slowed in recent years, and grid congestion costs are rising. In addition to building more transmission, there is an opportunity to meet U.S. needs for near-term grid capacity growth quickly and cost-effectively with advanced transmission technologies (ATTs). Although these technologies have been successfully installed outside of the United States, and early use in the United States has been promising, researchers, regulators, and policymakers increasingly recognize that these technologies are widely under-adopted in the United States because of the incentives for transmission providers and information provided to regulators. This research commentary proposes a framework for supporting adoption, which includes requiring transmission providers to use ATTs in some contexts, requiring transmission providers and regulators to conduct robust analysis of opportunities for ATTs, creating financial incentives for transmission providers to adopt ATTs, and developing digital tools to inform adoption. The commentary also highlights the limitations of this framework for overcoming barriers to adoption in their entirety and proposes a more transformative change, shifting the responsibility of ATT planning altogether to a third party.