Real Power Requires Real Transmission

As the United States rapidly adds new electricity generation – especially wind, solar and natural gas – there’s a growing realization that building power plants alone is not enough to meet our rising need for power.

The electric grid itself must also expand, particularly the high-voltage transmission network that carries electricity over long distances. Without sufficient transmission, new generation cannot reliably reach communities, leading to bottlenecks, higher costs and delayed projects.

The concern is not theoretical. Grid connection queues in the U.S. have ballooned, with hundreds of gigawatts of mostly renewable generation waiting years for transmission access. A key reason is that grid infrastructure has not kept pace with the surge in new generation, creating what the International Energy Agency calls a “critical bottleneck” for integrating supply and demand.

Transmission improves reliability and reduces congestion. A larger, more interconnected grid allows operators – like the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) that oversees (CO-OP)’s region – to move power to wherever it’s needed, helping respond to increasing electricity demand and smoothing out variability in energy production. This in turn keeps the power grid stable for end-use consumers.

MISO currently has several transmission projects planned for its Midwest region, but the total scale of the required national buildout over the next decade is enormous. The U.S. likely needs around 5,000 miles of new transmission lines per year to keep up with demand growth and new generation. That’s roughly 50,000 miles of new transmission by the mid-2030s. Additionally, new transmission lines often take a decade or more to plan and permit, meaning delays today can affect grid capacity far into the future.

Planning for new generation without also planning for transmission is like building factories without roads to ship the goods. The next 10 years will require tens of thousands of miles of new high-voltage lines to keep pace with the energy transition. If transmission expansion lags, it will increasingly become the limiting factor, not generation, in shaping the future of the electric grid.