Green Giants – Episode 24

Rob Gramlich (01:32)

Sure, maybe it’s a little embarrassing.

In college, I was looking for an honors thesis topic and stumbled upon this issue. I had some good Colby economics professors who were engaged in the utility system and things like, you know, permit trading and things like that for emissions, how to clean up the power system. But I got kind of intrigued with how the utility system actually works and realized that in New England, where I went to school, they were dispatching different units based on different criteria at different times. So I wrote an honors thesis about that in 1990 and 91 and so, it’s embarrassing because here I am 30 plus years later, really kind of doing the same work. I really haven’t strayed.

Wes Ashworth (02:16)

That’s kind of awesome in a way too. I love that. Hey, you stayed true with what you know and what you’re passionate about. So nothing wrong with that. So I know kind of getting into some of these big topics. You’ve often said that the grid is the biggest barrier to clean energy growth. And I think others have heard that, right? But maybe don’t understand it. So can you explain just why that is from your perspective and what specific challenges the grid currently faces?

Rob Gramlich (02:39)

Sure, well, I think it starts with comparing how the grid is operated and planned today, historically how you ran the power system with the base load and the intermediate generation and then how you connect the coal and the gas and the nuclear plants. And then, fast forward to sort of, what does it look like to run a very high renewable penetration grid? And it becomes clear when you compare those worlds that you operate and plan very differently for the future very high renewable grid, and you really have to understand the thing I say to renewable energy advocates all the time and people in the business is you really have to understand how the power system operates and what it needs in order to figure out how renewables fit in.

Because renewables are just plugging into a system and providing a service, and if it’s not a service it needs or if it’s something about the reliability standards on the generators plugging in, the grid has no trouble, like utility officials have no trouble saying, sorry, you cannot connect here or I’m gonna curtail you an hour from now. You just have to, it’s like going into an airport with TSA, like you have no power in this situation. You just have to follow the rules. But, you know, longer term you can kind of look to use the TSA analogy. We can collectively kind of say, you know what, there could be a different arrangement where they could process people better, differently, and let’s work with policymakers because there’s a way that you can actually operate with, let’s say, 60, 80 % of your energy from renewables, but you just operate and plan differently.

So one of those, the biggest thing I think is the transmission infrastructure and you know we can get into all the issues with that, but to me the number one thing is if we want a really high clean energy based grid that’s also affordable and reliable because it’s going to have to be affordable and reliable for the whole country to want to do it. Then you have to really focus on that infrastructure but also the operating protocols, the markets and everything else about how the power system works.

Wes Ashworth (04:57)

Yeah, can you break down a little bit around just some basic understanding around the infrastructure as it stands today? And then I know there’s a ton of generation capacity waiting to connect to the US grid that’s just laying there in wait. So if you can kind of break that down a little bit, help us understand that. And then what are some solutions that go along with that?

Rob Gramlich (05:20)

Sure. So, I mean, we’ve got to a point where the grid is constrained, the capacity is limited. And we got here because, first of all, the industry grew up out of, you know, a thousand plus little utilities that were kind of planning their own little system, with their local generation to serve their local load. And then the, you know, the connections between those utilities were sort of you know came later were sort of an afterthought or just a later development and those connections between the utilities have been increasing over the years after the 1965 blackout and the 2003 blackout and other drivers of building up these regional connections, but we have to realize that our industry structure, like the way utilities are structured and the way the regulatory system is structured, was never really designed for these big, long regional lines.

Well, that becomes important because with renewables, there’s a couple facts about renewables that really matter. Number one, the new sites, the wind and solar, the best places to put big wind and solar projects are usually pretty remote from load. You want cheaper land and good resources, that’s especially true with wind because the wind speed varies so much, but it’s also true with solar. So that’s one thing, but also when we’re talking about going from 20% renewables on a system is nice, but we want to get to 60 or 80. Well, if you want to get to 60 or 80, that’s a whole different thing. And what you need to do is rely on the fact that the wind is always blowing somewhere. The sun is shining in different time zones or where it’s cloudy or sunny.

So now you’ve got to integrate all these renewable projects across hundreds of miles, up to a thousand or more miles away. And you only do that with infrastructure. I mean, you can’t do it without infrastructure. You also need operating protocols and market rules. But the infrastructure is really hard and takes a long time. So that’s kind of the need as a nation. We built a lot of big, high voltage, long-distance transmission in like the 70s when we thought we were going to keep having 5% load growth every year. Well, that sort of flattened out. So we kind of, when we restructured the electric industry in the late 90s, which happened to some degree in most states, then we sort of forgot about the transmission infrastructure part at that time because we had inherited this overhang, this excess transmission capacity. So we just took it for granted. And then as time passed, we’ve been gradually using up that spare capacity, and of course, load growth is taking off big time now.

So it’s abundantly clear if it hadn’t been before that we have a constrained grid. And of course, you got renewable projects getting curtailed all the time in certain regions or let’s say a quarter of the time, which is a big deal financially. And then other projects that just either can’t connect or they’re just seeing very low prices because they can’t get the power out. So you have a real constrained grid and that’s basically where we are. So a lot of generators then, renewable generators then apply for interconnection. And so if you total that up across the country, and this is probably what you’ve heard about and you’re referring to in the question, is we’ve got about 2.6 terawatts of generation, which is double the amount of generation we’ve got even operating of any type in the country.

So it’s a lot, and that’s a reflection that all this generation is, you know, hung up trying to connect to a constrained grid. But then there’s also a number of issues with the interconnection process and sort of an incentive to if you’re a generator and you’re not sure if you’re going to get connected, well, you might as well file three or four or five applications and see if one of them, you know, gets a quicker or a cheaper interconnection cost so that then that becomes a self-reinforcing process, so then now we have interconnection queues ballooning to unmanageable numbers.

Wes Ashworth (09:25)

Yeah, and I know you’ve also mentioned that the barriers can be categorized into three P’s. So planning, permitting and paying. Can you break down each of these barriers for the listeners and explain why they’re so critical to address?

Rob Gramlich (09:37)

Great, all right, we’re into my favorite mantras, the three P’s, and I should have said that we need the grid bigger than the weather when we were talking about the big regional integration. But yeah, so the three P’s, I think is a useful way to think about the barriers to transmission, because first of all, most people tend to just think about kind of the NIMBY problem, and that is an issue, certainly, building any type of energy project can, you know, even if you have 98% community support, there’s always the other 2%. And, you know, what do you do? You know, nobody wants to steamroll people and you work out the best places to put infrastructure and it’s necessarily to some extent a public process.

So that is the first P is kind of the permitting problem. And it’s harder for linear, long linear infrastructure like transmission than it is for point, you location, generation, you put in the generation in one spot, but you’re a transmission line across, it could be hundreds of parcels of land and guess what, they all need to be contiguous, they have to connect to each other. You can’t jump over. So that just makes it a very high degree of difficulty for any linear infrastructure, especially since overhead lines are still the most affordable way to go. A little bit of undergrounding can help, but that’s pricey and people don’t want to necessarily look at the infrastructure. So it’s a permitting and community relations issue. So that’s the first P.

Second P is the planning. Here, mainly from a consumer standpoint, but balancing all the interests. You want the right configuration of the grid. You want to use HVDC AC type lines. You want to use grid enhancing technologies if they can solve the problem or on an interim basis. And you know have the right, you know, capacity level, there are massive economies of scale. So the bigger you build, like build a 500 kV line instead of a 230 kV line, you know, you can get, you know, three or four times the power.

So you want to take advantage of that so that the cost, you know, per delivered megawatt of energy is lower, but that requires forward planning because you might not need that size for five or 10 years, but you want to build it once and build the right size. So all those things require planning and all of the finding the right technology and configuration requires planning. Turns out, based on the history I described, we were by the early part of this century, we weren’t really doing much transmission planning because again, we kind of had forgotten about it. We thought we had enough and the expertise said people had retired. So now we have to get back into real planning and we’re trying to figure that out. It’s playing out at the regional level. We can talk about the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rules and other activities on planning. So that’s the second P.

And then the third P is often the hardest and it’s usually the least recognized by the casual observers and it’s paying. And what that means is, let’s say you’re going to build a line, let’s say 500 kV line that goes across five or six states. Well, there’s probably, if it’s going across five or six states, there’s probably 15 or more states that actually would receive some impact or benefit from it. But, you know, guess what? When something benefits everybody, any given single state might say, well, I don’t actually benefit. Why don’t we let the other guys pay? So it’s kind of a classic public good problem of when everybody benefits and everybody wants somebody else to pay and you can’t, you know?

If it does get built, you can still use it like you can’t keep people from using it once it’s there. So then it becomes a challenge of figuring out how to get everybody to pay the right amount. And sometimes there are successful examples where everybody agrees and somebody did a great job getting all the people to the table and voluntarily a whole bunch of utilities on behalf of their retail rate payers will say, yeah, we’ll put in $50 million or $200 million and pay our share and get some access to it. But that’s very limited. It’s sort of more possible if you have DC lines where you can literally exclude who gets to use the line and who doesn’t.

But with AC lines, it’s all part of the power flows where it flows across the Eastern, Western, and Texas grids. You can’t control it. So then it becomes a regulatory process and it gets back to the FERC and figuring out how are we going to decide? What are the, you know, rules and methods? And even let’s create a process because in most of the country, there’s not even a process to figure that out. So there’s been a lot of work done recently to put in a system to try to figure out who pays. This is a part of the permitting legislation in Congress that Barrasso and Manchin are working on.

It will probably get considered at the end of this year, December 2024 here, but also a central part of the various FERC initiatives on that, as well as pretty much every region is talking about how they’re going to assign the cost. So that’s the paying part, planning, permitting, paying, and all three need work to get any infrastructure built.

Wes Ashworth (15:16)

Yeah, and kind of transitioning a little bit into some solutions. And I guess that’s the thing, is you look at it, you look at what needs to happen, just the demand is increasing and looking at the current grid system, there’s not a single solution that makes it all happen and go, hey, here’s an instant fix. I think it’s a lot of little pieces that go into it. Part of that that’s become a hot topic lately is just grid enhancing technologies or GETs.

So thinking about that, I guess how do these technologies help unlock grid capacity? What’s the current status of their adoption across the US?

Rob Gramlich (15:48)

Sure, yeah, thanks for asking. I think they’re really an important addition to the system. Usually the category of grid enhancing technologies is associated with kind of the operational technologies. So dynamic line ratings, I can describe each of these quickly. Yeah, dynamic line, well just the, usually the three are dynamic line ratings, topology optimization, and power flow control. Sometimes people put storage as transmission in there as well. But to take the, one of the easiest to understand is let’s say you’re in Oklahoma, the wind farm is getting curtailed because the wind’s blowing and the line is rated at 100 megawatts. And so the system operator says, sorry, you guys collectively are producing more than 100 megawatts from these wind farms in this area. So we’re going to have to curtail you, you have to reduce your operation.

Well, it turns out that same wind is also blowing on that cable in the air and what it’s doing is cooling the line down and guess what? The limit, that 100 megawatt limit, is based on the thermal capacity of the line and if it’s getting cooled down then it could actually operate at let’s say 120 or 130 megawatts for the same performance, for the same risk of overheating as on some other day when it’s operating at 100.

Instead of a static rating where it’s a hundred megawatts day in and day out, why don’t we make it a dynamic line rating and say, well on these days the wind is blowing at this speed and direction, let’s make it 130 megawatts. And everybody’s happy, like everybody wins. So it seems like a no-brainer. It does require a little bit of cost, usually a remote monitoring system that’s either on the line or next to the line to check the actual conditions.

And it requires also utility systems because the grid operator is going to have to know in real time and respond in real time to that information. And of course, they have hard jobs already, it’s adding some complexity, so it takes some work. And then, of course, you have cybersecurity and all the normal things that you have to deal with with information. But none of that is really rocket science. It’s all sort of, you know, just things, you know, kind of growing pains, just things to work on. And the economic opportunity is so great that it really is, in most places, justified. So what do you do about that? FERC is considering a line rating rule where they say under such and such conditions you have to install it or you have to install X percent in the first couple of years just to test out the systems and get your processes ready and things like that, or there could be incentives that are put in place.

So that’s dynamic line rating. then topology optimization is more like kind of the ways or the GPS of the grid where you can actually just, when circuits are opened and closed, which is more of a, you know, over let’s say a two or three month period based on the configuration or maybe there’s some construction going on or lines that are out of service. You could kind of say, you know what, if we, you run this software and it says here’s a whole different configuration with different circuits open or closed, we can actually reduce the cost. Cost, now that’s a change because cost has not ever really been a factor for those decisions of circuits.

So then the idea is from a consumer standpoint, wouldn’t we like to reduce the cost using this software? So that’s that one. then power flow control is the one that’s actually physically controlling the movement of power. You can send more over one line versus another line. power, of course, moves over parallel paths, right? It flows on path of least resistance over the integrated network. it’s sort of, you know, it’s like water flowing in a bunch of interconnected pipes. It’s just going to flow where the pressure is lower and the power is going to flow based on the ampacity, so you can change that ampacity and move the power and you can do that now with these smaller modular power flow controller systems.

So anyway, these are all operational technologies that improve efficiencies and they probably aren’t going to just magically get deployed without some push from policymakers and regulators. So it’s important now that you’re doing this podcast, so more people can hear about it and start asking their utilities, hey, how come you’re not doing this? Because this could reduce your costs and integrate this additional clean energy.

Wes Ashworth (20:22)

You mentioned that the utility business model isn’t always conducive to innovation, like employing grid enhancing technologies and things like that as well. What challenges are the utilities facing in adopting these advanced technologies and how can they overcome these barriers?

Rob Gramlich (20:39)

Sure, yeah, at the most basic level, it is true that the investor-owned utility incentive structure leads them to make more money on large capital investments because the way their revenues are determined, or their profits are determined as a percentage of their invested capital. Cost of service regulation and rate of return regulation, rates of return set by regulators.

You know, there’s not like a great, in the economic theory and economic policy, there’s not a great alternative to that approach. It has great advantages because, you know, historically we wanted to build a lot of infrastructure and we still want to build a lot of infrastructure. So, you know, it’s not the worst approach. It’s not like it’s an obviously bad approach, it’s just that the downside of it is, you know, on the margin, if you’re considering a really cheap grid enhancing technology that does add anything noticeable to your capital rate base, it’s hard to get attention of senior management or persuade utilities that this is in their interest.

So, there’s a bit of an oversimplification and certainly some utilities are doing a really good job with technologies. But I do think industry-wide it is an issue and that’s another reason why we need attention on this topic and why we need regulators to have a special concerted push on this set of technologies.

Wes Ashworth (22:02)

Yeah, and shifting a little bit to the legislative landscape with the momentum behind permitting reform in Congress, what do you see as the most significant policy change on the horizon that could impact the renewable energy sector as a whole?

Rob Gramlich (22:16)

Sure, well FERC has a couple of initiatives. Order 1920 is out and official. It’s in place. It’s now in the process of implementation. So that’s a big deal that’ll be, you know, hopefully making changes over the coming years. Regions shouldn’t be waiting, they should be implementing. Obviously some are going to try to litigate a little bit. That’s just par for the course on FERC rules.

But that hopefully will be creating better regional planning. Order 1920 is about regional planning, sort of within each region. So, you know, MISO in the Midwest, Southwest Power Pool, SPP in the Plains, New York, New England, PJM, and then the non-RTO

areas have their own planning entities. So that’s a big deal. FERC is also considering an interregional action, but I think they’re kind of waiting a little bit because another potentially really big deal is the EPRA permitting bill in Congress, Barrasso and Manchin negotiated in the Senate Energy Committee, and that has a big focus on inter-regional planning and some changes that some of them address each of the three P’s, planning, permitting, and paying.

And the language is really good in my opinion. It’s very well crafted and I think there is a real possibility. Obviously, transmission is not the only part of that bill, so a lot of members of Congress are thrilled with the transmission part, not happy with other parts, and now they have to do with tough balancing. But I can certainly see a scenario where that gets passed at the end of the year after the election in the so-called lame duck period, and if that passed, there would be a lot of, I think, opportunity on that large-scale transmission.

FERC would be given quite a few tasks to implement, and so I think the agency’s kind of waiting to see what happens with that, and obviously we’re approaching a period here in the Washington DC area where a lot of changes in terms of who’s in charge of these agencies could you know could be affected.

Wes Ashworth (24:24)

Yeah, sure. And I know the process for permitting new transmission lines alone can take more than 10 years on some occasions. With some of those changes coming, do you see that improving any time in the near future or over the next five, 10 years? Or are some of these changes that you just mentioned, will that start to improve that right away? And then I’m curious, what level do you see it? If it’s maybe 10 years or more now sometimes, what does that look like going forward?

Rob Gramlich (24:53)

Sure. Well, there are certain things that agencies can do on their own. I think the Biden administration has had, very senior level involvement to say, hey, we really you know, consider these lines in the national interest and let’s do everything we can to get them approved on a timely basis, without, doing any shortcuts around environmental review that’s required, but let’s make sure we do our part to process these things efficiently. So that’s been going better and better recently.

Some of the legislation passed in this Congress or these four years, the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, did include more resources for the processing and that’s helpful too because sometimes they’re just strapped on staff and consultants. Hopefully that would, you know, continue and expand, but also I think you know we can’t solve this just by adding government staff. To some extent their job needs to be easier and there needs to be, you know, places where there are so-called categorical exclusions, where like you don’t actually need to go through a whole three to five year NEPA process and be subject to litigation because you forgot one, you did the study wrong on page 836.

So I think some of those curtailing, limiting, streamlining, whatever you wanna call it on the review process are very necessary. And some of that’s in executive branch rule makings related to NEPA or related transmission initiatives, but also some of it is in legislation. I’m hopeful that the permitting bill will pass and that also we’ll have an administration that will be continuing to improve the process here for permitting some of these lines.

There’s a little bit of a distinction in the transmission permitting where if you’re over federal land, you obviously have to deal with whichever federal land management agency and that’s kind of one process. If you’re over private land, it’s usually county or state permitting process, but there’s now a greater federal backstop where FERC could step in if there’s a national interest type line and operate more like they do on the gas pipeline side, which means they have authority to issue the permit and they can overrule what some county might say. But, you know, the way they usually implement that is they go out and work with those communities and figure out is there a better route or configuration or how do we find, you know, try to, you know, maximize all these, in a way that ultimately expands capacity. That process is only really beginning to be implemented at FERC after some changes in the bipartisan infrastructure law a couple years ago.

Wes Ashworth (27:46)

Yeah. And another, just a shift, I want to cover as many of these big topics as we can, and another big part of the solution that you’re hearing a lot of and it’s becoming more more of a focus, is just a shift towards decentralized energy infrastructure. How do you see decentralized systems such as microgrids just reshaping the future of the US power grid? And from your perspective, what’s important to know?

Rob Gramlich (28:10)

Sure, well I think one really big opportunity is smaller scale solar and storage, especially that which can be put on things like commercial rooftops where there’s a little bit of scale to it. Like most, a lot of people in this business, I have solar panels on my roof, but in reality I just don’t have the energy production potential on my property. I’m not gonna cut down the shady trees which keep it cool in the summer and all that sort of thing. But within, say, five miles of my house, I drive around. Like most people, can kind of see, there’s these warehouses and other places where you could put more. So that type of thing requires distribution grid planning by the utility. One hopes that those utilities would be doing everything they could to accommodate it. It turns out that’s not always the case. So there is a lot of work needed with, you know, public utility commissions and county governments, etc. to try to better integrate that type of power because that’s meaningful amounts of power there.

And, you can imagine how, you know, if you did some of that ground-up planning, you can take some of the burden off the bulk power system. So I’m excited about that. It’s a lot of work. You know, I do think there are limits to the opportunities there. I just think of most urban areas where people live and work and you know how many, you know, gigawatt hours, terawatt hours of power they need compared to the you know energy production potential in the cities or near the cities and it’s just limited. So you know the bulk power system especially as we, you know, really need to, again, to get from like 20% renewable, which is sort of nice, but you know, 50, 70, 80%, you’re gonna have to integrate multiple renewables and basically not just solar, right? You’re gonna need wind and geothermal hydro, and that really requires, you know, more of the macro grid type of thinking, the wind’s always blowing somewhere, you need to get it from different areas and integrate it across large areas.

And that’s where I think a lot of the biggest resource potential is to get very high renewable penetration. you know, I think there is sort of more, you know, macro grid and more micro grid work that is needed and provides opportunities On microgrids specifically. Honestly, I’ve always been a bit of a skeptic on what, if any, benefit that has for clean energy or climate. I think that’s more of a resilience opportunity, starting with hospitals and things that provide public service that must be operating. And if you’re a data farm or whatever and it’s in your private interest to be able to island yourself from the broader grid, great, go for it, but of course you pay for it. It’s not providing a public service, that’s providing a private service. So I mean, by very definition, a microgrid is for the benefit of whatever’s inside it and it’s not necessarily helping any user outside it. It’s more of a private, and the other thing is, I think only a tiny percentage of microgrid power is actually coming from renewables. So I’m a little skeptical of what, if any, tie it has to climate and clean energy objectives.

Wes Ashworth (31:46)

Just from your perspective as well, just thinking about just what’s coming, you know, innovations that you predict maybe will dominate the energy markets in the coming years. I’d love to know what your thoughts are on those and then how should stakeholders prepare.

Rob Gramlich (32:04)

Sure, well getting into generation a little bit, obviously for energy, wind and solar are super cheap. Energy storage costs have come down dramatically. So wind, solar storage are like locked in. There’s just not a utility in the country that doesn’t have a lot of that in their plans. But then when you look at the whole system, they’re gonna need firm power as well. What do you do on a cold winter morning? You don’t have, the sun’s not up yet, and there will be days where the wind isn’t blowing hard. So that’s the firm power need, and sometimes you can have multiple days over a week where you don’t have a lot of renewable, so that’s the firm power. And eventually we’ll need that to be clean as well. So there’s this huge race going on in the technology realm about clean firm power. I don’t know enough, it’s not really my expertise to say whether nuclear is going to win or enhanced geothermal or long duration batteries. I’m just happy all of those things are getting support and probably some combination of a bunch of them will end up being part of the mix and might vary regionally. So that’s the generation side.

On transmission, I think we’ll see more high voltage DC coming into the mix. Everything’s really been AC integrated grid. But I think the benefits of very long distance transmission is becoming more widely recognized. I’m hopeful that we’ll alleviate some of the supply chain problems with HVDC. Turns out the war in Ukraine led to a lot of the equipment being bought up for a lot of the equipment we need. European countries have like government backing for their HVDC equipment orders with the very few HVDC providers so anybody in the US is kind of behind them in line for that equipment but hopefully we’ll ,you know, get some of that equipment supply constraint, alleviate it and get some of the equipment. So I think high voltage DC, and then we talked about grid enhancing technologies.

And then the other one I think we mentioned was high performance conductors, like the actual cable. They have carbon or composite core cables that don’t sag much, and that’s helpful for resilience for severe weather, but also you can deliver a lot of power because they’re not heating up and sagging into vegetation so you can get sometimes double the throughput on those lines. So that’s a big deal. yeah, there’s quite a lot happening in the grid technology space, but those are probably the main ones.

Wes Ashworth (34:34)

Yeah, no, perfect. And I know we’ve talked through several misconceptions up to this point in providing some education around those, but as we get closer to time, are there any other major just misconceptions out there, misunderstandings out there that you hear pretty frequently and you’re having to address or course correct on? And I’d love to hear what those are and then some of your solutions behind those.

Rob Gramlich (34:54)

Sure, well going back to what I think is really the biggest barrier to large-scale infrastructure, this issue of who benefits and who pays, there’s a lot of arguments between states. Some states say, well, we don’t have your blue state clean energy dreams and we don’t want to pay for your frivolous whatever they call it. I mean I’m just trying to exaggerate but you know in each state point into other states you know the reality is it is an interconnected grid. most of the lines are you know flowing both directions multiple directions depending on the you know the weather or system conditions. Once they’re built, they usually do benefit everybody. I can’t, I still haven’t found this, you know, mysterious line that was built and nobody benefits or nobody uses it. This sort of, you know, people use this straw man in policy arguments, but like nobody’s ever identified such a horror story like that. Like once they’re built, they’re, they’re used.

So, I think we just kind of need to get over that through conversation about all the various uses and like do scenario planning. Well, in all these scenarios, you know, the power is flowing this direction and benefiting these folks. And it doesn’t mean everybody has to pay the exact same amount. So this is kind of a lot of the work right now between states and at FERC of, who pays how much based on what scenario. The law of the land says beneficiaries pay. Sometimes people interpret that to be, only the instigator pays, like we’re just fine, but you’re the next large load on the system or you’re the next new generator on the system so you need to pay for the huge expansion.

That’s not what the law says. The law says beneficiaries pay. So if that thing gets built, that new line gets built and everybody ends up using it, well then everybody needs to pay their fair share. we’re still sort of discussing that and working through the misunderstandings to hopefully get some resolution both at a regional level and in FERC processes.

Wes Ashworth (36:50)

Yeah, no, really good points there. I’ll transition a little bit just in closing thoughts. So looking ahead, what are you most optimistic about in terms of grid modernization and renewable energy? And then really, and I’ll let you kind of go on and anything you want to share here, but what messages would you like to leave with the listeners and just key takeaways for those that are in the industry or closely connected to it?

Rob Gramlich (37:12)

Sure, well, I’ll take it up a level, another 10 or 20,000 feet, observe that transmission, like many issues, got kind of partisan in recent years, and that’s never what you want. It just so happened that Democrats in Congress were looking at what’s important for climate and they realized transmission is right at the near the top of the list so it became a democratic priority and then Republicans kind of said, wait a minute if they like it then there must be a reason we don’t like it which is sort of unfortunate and, I think ill-informed, especially considering 20 years ago, I’ve been in Washington doing transmission policy for longer than that, and was all Republicans leading these same initiatives 20 years ago. Anyway, that’s the Washington story, and then down at the state and local or regional level, it’s sort of similar. Like you had a bit of a division between the red states and the blue states. The blue states were decarbonizing, and they saw transmission as an important thing.

So what I’m hopeful about is that that dynamic ends in 2024. And we move to a new phase for the rest of the decade where it’s much more bipartisan. And the reason I’m hopeful is that power demand is affecting all regions and is a huge driver of grid infrastructure. And that relates to economic development. Many states, and blue, are trying to attract these businesses manufacturing data centers and others, and there’s a huge national security aspect to this where the whole national security community is saying, wait a minute, we want this manufacturing and these data centers and all this data to be inside the borders of the United States and do less in Asia and other parts of the world where maybe we have data access and control issues.

So that national security community, I keep seeing them speak up more and more about why we need the grid infrastructure here in order to support that for national security reasons. So that’s interesting. that economic development and national security dynamic, I think really could shift transmission out of a partisan frame and into a more bipartisan frame. And you can imagine, I don’t want to get too far into politics, but there are certain tech titans who are very influential with the Republican candidate for president who presumably want that and have said they really believe there’s an important grid infrastructure expansion needed. So there’s important influencers on both the Democratic and Republican side. So there could be ways that, under either scenario in November where transmission can get more bipartisan support.

Wes Ashworth (40:04)

Yeah, those are such great points and something I just believe so wholeheartedly and it’s just that bipartisan support and it is not a this side or this side issue. It’s an all, everybody, all encompassing issue and we all need to work on solutions, work together, collaborate, which I think is critical for, especially if you look at a lot of the challenges that you’ve outlined during this interview, it is complex. There’s just so much going on and so much to go into making it harder. Sometimes it’s like, feel like both arms are tied behind your back, you know, trying to make this happen. So that bipartisan support, I think, is critically important. And I feel like even this year, there’s more and more optimism in that. More people talking about that, which is great, but great, final thoughts there.

So that’ll wrap up our conversation with Rob Gramlich, founder and president of Grid Strategies LLC. Rob, you really provided valuable insights into the challenges facing our power grid and the innovation shaping the future of renewable energy. So thank you for joining us and for your commitment to advancing clean energy solutions. To our listeners, as always, thank you for tuning in to Green Giants, Titans of Renewable Energy. If you enjoyed this discussion, please subscribe, share it with your network, and help us get the word out. We’ll see you next time.