Accelerating Transmission Build

The building of electric utility infrastructure, with its many reasons for delays, is feared to possibly stymie the needed growth of the industry to handle increased demand, as well as hobble the transition to clean energy. It is complicated, and technology is looked at as one of the solutions.

Enter CTC Global, on a mission to educate all on a proven technology to overcome the need for electric transmission. For more than twenty years, the company has developed products and services to expand access to electricity and enable a fast, cost effective, and environmentally responsible expansion of the grid.

To meet historic demand growth and the overflowing interconnection queue of resources, CTC Global’s solution is the ACCC, a conductor that doubles capacity in the existing right of way. Here, CTC Global Chief Policy and Grid Strategy Officer Theodore Paradise explains how advanced conductors will help solve a big problem.

PUF’s Steve Mitnick: There’s so much pressure to respond to load growth and talk about speed to market that the grid can’t respond fast enough for this new load. How do you assess that?

Theodore Paradise: We’re in the middle of a confluence of events right now that is years in the making. Yes, the AI data center energy boom is getting a lot of headlines right now because it’s unprecedented; we usually don’t talk about tens of gigawatts of load being added in the course of a few years.

But even before we had the load growth from data centers, we saw proposals for electrification being formed around transportation, construction, heating, and other industries. We were going to see load growth, and even ten years ago, we knew it was going to be a challenge. The question is, how do you serve that much load quickly with the challenges around that?

If we go from almost flat load growth to a big period of load growth moving all of this, we’re going to have to add capacity. At the same time, we saw states in many places wanting to move from a fossil-based generating fleet to a renewable-based fleet, which will require transmission infrastructure to interconnect those resources. On top of that, utilities have historically operated very slowly and incrementally, which doesn’t match the pace of demand growth we’re witnessing.

So, we’ve seen this coming at us for years now and we are going to make greater use of the electric grid than we have in the past. AI gets headlines, but this is not something that just creeped up on us.

Over the last ten to fifteen years, we have been looking at how the grid would transform. The problems that we’re seeing now around speed to market are more acute realizations of some of these issues. How quickly transmission can be planned and built is sort of an existential enabling threshold to how quickly new generation can be interconnected to serve new load.

We have now historic demand growth, and, at the same time, we have a historically overflowing interconnection queue of generating resources. Supply and demand, if I just looked at those two pieces, it sounds good. The connecting piece in the middle, the transmission grid, is what’s not there to balance this historic supply with this historic demand.

PUF: It takes years of planning and there’s a lot of innovation trying to solve this problem. What is the strategy on that?

Theodore Paradise: The utility industry has shifted from one of, “we can predict what’s going to happen and we can plan ahead ten years” to “the need is right on top of us and growing at an exponential rate.” From “we know the technology that we’ve always used” to one where both the rate of demand growth and solutions is on a digital time scale with innovations to try to address those.

We see an incredible amount of problem-solving being pushed in the direction of the grid. The interesting thing is that innovation, even some of these things that have been around for a couple of decades like advanced conductors, is running into a massive ship that doesn’t turn quickly, which is the utility industry.

Tech innovation is happening at a rapid pace, but it runs right into something that wants to change over decades. You see this even in the regulatory response to some of this.

FERC realized we’ve got this big mismatch of supply and demand and did a big planning order, Order 1920. FERC expects to see compliance filings, eventually, so it can act on those. Then at some point, the process starts and there will be planning and procurement. That’s a fifteen-year process from start to finish with a new transmission line.

Now, we have Amazon Web Services with gigawatts of load, or Meta or Google’s gigawatts of load. And that voice saying, “I need service now” is running into that utility culture of, “we do this over several years.”

The problem to solve now is not only moving x amount of power to y location, but the speed at which that can be done. It’s a new planning criteria.

If I am one of those large customers, I am moving at a digital speed. I want to build a data center in nine months. I want to interconnect it and serve it in another nine months. I’m told, “the transmission is seven years or a decade away.”

That does not compute. How are we going to solve that? What are we going to do?

PUF: CTC Global has an amazing high-capacity advanced conductor. What’s the thinking as CTC evolved and realized it can solve some of these problems?

Theodore Paradise: I have spent twenty-five years working on transmission issues. I spent fifteen years at an RTO writing a lot of these planning rules and getting used to how long transmission takes. It was ingrained in me: you can only go so fast.

I was working with CTC when I was with K&L Gates and saw what they were doing with the ACCC, the conductor that doubles the capacity in the existing right of way. I went to the company with a mission-driven focus to say, “This is absolutely transformative. We need to be doing this all over the place because I know how long it takes otherwise.”

I saw the alternative, which was not workable in this new world we are in, and I realized CTC’s advanced conductor could not only help, but it is also the only way to double transmission capacity in months instead of several years.

Part of the challenge is an education gap, helping people understand that we can double the capability of our existing transmission system quickly, that such an outcome is even possible.

That is game-changing and it’s at the scale and speed of solution needed. How fortuitous for CTC, but also how fortunate for the energy industry – from these large customers to electricity consumers in general – that we have a solution that meets growing needs and can help cut costs for everyone. This is not just solving the transmission capacity issue, this is solving expensive reliability issues and doing so in a way that saves consumers – individual ratepayers, families, businesses – money.

PUF: How did your new friends at CTC Global react when you said this could be a game changer?

Theodore Paradise: We were strongly aligned. The company does this all around the world. Electrification of places with massive populations like India or places experiencing huge population growth, where CTC is adding loads in some cases for the first time. Across the globe CTC has deployed over one hundred twenty-five thousand miles of ACCC over the past two decades.

They saw this coming. This was not an epiphany that I brought to them. The next piece of this is not just having the solution, it’s being proactive with the solution.

There are policies that must change. Education across the industry is needed. It takes conversations and proactive engagement to make that happen.

PUF: If you magically could push a button and reconductor all the high-voltage grid, then it would behave with much more capability. System operators would say, “Yeah, but.” Have you run into that?

Theodore Paradise: There are some “yeah, but” statements out there. When we talk about advanced conductors and CTC’s ACCC, in the U.S. it’s the first choice when there are no other choices.

When they can’t get a new right of way or have a long crossing that needs a long span, they’ll say “we’ll absolutely use your conductors.” For the ACCC projects that CTC has across thirty-plus states, that’s where it’s been mostly used. There’s a lot of adoption.

The “yeah, but” is, “well, if I’m doing my transmission plan, then I’m generally adding lines. This is what we do. We have a ten-year regional plan, but if we change that, we’ll have to think and work through whether that makes sense.”

Even FERC’s 1920 Order is just a twenty-year regional plan instead of a ten-year regional plan. But it’s not drastically changing things in the near- or mid-term. FERC, in that order, says advanced conductors should be looked at as alternatives to accelerate things.

But it’s still basically the same model. What’s happening now, in this discussion, is ACCC is used when there is no other choice.

What’s developing, though, is the realization that for the timescale for big customers, there’s no other choice. Just like not being able to get a new right of way or a long span issue, advanced conductors can solve the problem of time now.

PUF: So, there are positive stories.

Theodore Paradise: Absolutely, both in the U.S. and around the world, because of electrification, data center use, transportation, and other growing power demands. There’s also an important wildfire mitigation story here.

Four years ago, it was for the capacity. Fast-forward to 2025, and these conductors move a lot of power, don’t get nearly as hot as trying to push a lot of power through a steel core conductor, and they don’t sag or sag very little.

The core of an ACCC conductor is a carbon composite, which has an inverse reaction to heat and steel. Steel gets hot when a lot of electrons are put through. It excites things. If it keeps going, it becomes pliable, which is what happens with the power line. The more power put through, it gets pliable, and you can see the power line sag significantly.

That creates the thermal limit. At some point, the system operator says, “That’s as much as we can put through it. Otherwise, we’re going to take that line down to the ground, and that would be a bad outcome.”

Instead, the ACCC’s carbon core heats up just a bit because the aluminum provides the initial strength. But then, once you’ve heated past that point, it won’t sag anymore because now you’re relying on the structural integrity of the carbon, and the carbon won’t move.

This keeps the carbon conductors away from potential vegetation contacts and allows ACCC to be pushed much harder for contingency use. ACCC has been tested to run at emergency levels for not just hours but over a year. That gives grid operators more options before disconnecting load.

There are a few other attributes that come with the carbon core. One is that the ACCC is much lighter, and because it’s much lighter, you can put more aluminum on it, and that allows you to move much more power.

Two is that more aluminum also reduces the resistance, the impedance on that line. With traditional steel conductors, the power runs through it, hits resistance, and takes more energy to go through that, which is line loss. That’s the heat coming off the line.

The ACCC has about thirty percent less resistance, which is less lost electricity. All of these things together means that line, when you’re running twice the power through it, is not operating at that high a temperature, 356 degrees F (180 degrees C), versus 662 degrees F (250 degrees C) for steel core lines.

To get that kind of power through a traditional steel core line like ACSS, the conductor is larger, heavier, needs a stronger structure, and sags more, meaning that the towers need to be taller. Those foundation and height costs for traditional conductors means that ACCC is the least costly way to double capacity, not to mention the time needed for all of that work.

Rather than offering high temperature and low sag, steel lines are really high temperature or low sag because to get the capacity through it, they have to heat up a lot and then become saggy. The ACCC is a line that doesn’t sag and that is even more important now in the changing ecosystem we find ourselves in, where triggering a wildfire is an ever more common story.

PUF: There’s a lot of momentum behind reconductoring, so where is this going?

Theodore Paradise: We are at an inflection point because we don’t have other solutions. That’s driving the education, with big end customers, utilities, policymakers, states, and governors who want the economic development; all looking for solutions.

What I see now is a lot of legislation out there telling utilities that they should look at reconductoring with advanced conductors. That is sending a signal to utilities that this is where we need to be going.

A utility as a business enterprise has an interest to respond to that. It’s also an opportunity to deploy capital. Because of the timescale needed, we will see an acceleration of advanced conductors used in rebuilds, new lines, and advanced reconductoring because they provide benefits in all three cases. Lower cost, more capacity, and faster.

With the Trump administration, one of their first orders was an energy emergency declaration. That’s a big deal. There’s a lot happening, so that energy emergency executive order kind of got lumped in with a lot of dramatic steps at the start of the administration.

It’s not lost on me or your readers that it’s a big deal. We see the potential to drive the use of advanced conductors, for reconductoring and for rebuilds of new lines, at the Presidential and Secretary of Energy levels, as they want to see real changes soon because we have an energy emergency: one of system reliability and cost but also the AI race.

If Microsoft or Google can’t locate their AI data center in the U.S., they will find a place to put it. Microsoft is going to spend over eighty billion dollars this fiscal year. A little more than half is in the U.S.

From a national security perspective, there’s a recognition that we want to own the AI industry for economic development and to keep those assets domestically located. If I’m looking at my crystal ball over the next year and a half, I see dramatic executive action pushing the energy industry to solve these issues. We’re already seeing that.

In the energy industry, business as usual is not going to fly or be met warmly by this administration which has already acknowledged that what we’re doing right now is not good enough.