The White House just gave GETs the green light

The White House has officially joined the load growth fray.

• The top line: As the country tries to make the most of the existing power system, today the Biden administration and 21 mostly blue states launched a grid modernization effort that includes encouraging reconductoring and the use of grid enhancing technologies, or GETs. The announcement, which comes in the wake of severe storms that caused power outages across Texas and elsewhere, demonstrates the increasing urgency to arm the grid in the near-term — years before other, more flashy technologies will be ready to scale. 
• The current take: White House national climate advisor Ali Zaidi described this as a “remarkable moment” for power sector decarbonization that demands a “multi-timescale set of solutions” to grapple with load growth. “We actually need stuff that can cook right now, right away, very, very quickly,” Zaidi said at a White House convening of stakeholders. “And the way to do that is by deploying grid enhancing technologies; by reconductoring lines that we have already strung up or buried across the country.”

Today’s multi-hour summit announcing the initiative was a gathering of GETs enthusiasts, including states, industry groups, regulators, and federal officials. The category of technologies includes both hardware and software tools designed to increase capacity and flexibility in the existing system, such as dynamic line rating.

“There’s no reason not to love grid-enhancing technologies,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, referencing the findings of the department’s recent “liftoff” report on the subject. She added that grid modernization is “the lowest-hanging fruit of being able to get additional capacity on the grid — and for the least amount of money.”

And additional capacity is sorely needed. On the one hand, the White House trumpeted that the U.S. is expected to build more generation capacity in 2024 than it has in two decades, 96% of which is considered clean energy. 

But on the other, a lot of that new capacity is left waiting in interconnection queues. And simultaneously, new sources of load — predominantly from electrification, new manufacturing, and data centers — are already pushing the existing grid to its limits. 

The federal-state initiative will involve state commitments to modernize their respective grids, using GETs and options like reconductoring to “more effectively meet current and future demand.” 

And in support, the Department of Energy will offer technical assistance for utilities, policy makers, regulators, and other stakeholders to make the states’ work easier. The governor coalition known as the U.S. Climate Alliance will also offer policy, technical, and analytical assistance.

“The way we really get productive, I think, is to actually take an approach that's similar to the one we've done on greenfield lines,” Zaidi said, meaning to use stakeholder gatherings like the one that happened at the White House today “to surface actual projects that people can invest in, in terms of capital, and in terms of political and policy energy.”

The goal, he said, is to move away from “abstract” conversation and toward real deployment. 

That said, today’s initiative is more a federal-state stamp of approval for GETS — and an acknowledgement of the urgency of the load growth problem — than it is a significant policy shift. The reality is that the Biden administration has limited power on the state level, and the success of the GETs and reconductoring deployment effort rests heavily on state legislatures and governors, as well as utilities. 

And on the federal level, the Biden administration has already done much of what's possible without Congress. Just last month, DOE moved to streamline federal permitting, including through a rule imposing a two-year stop-clock on the process. And two weeks ago, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission unveiled long-awaited transmission rules that updated how new lines are planned and paid for. 

But it’s Congress that holds the purse. The 2021 infrastructure law created a $10.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program, dedicated to modernizing the grid. Granholm said today that the second round of GRIP funding has closed, and “the focus is really going to be on advanced conductoring and grid enhancing technology.” 

Meanwhile, just weeks ago, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said recently that a bill to reform transmission is unlikely to be passed before the election in November — despite his colleague Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.V.) adamance on the subject.