The US electricity transmission system is reaching the limits of its capacity in a moment when the needs of the grid are shifting rapidly. Extreme weather, a clean energy backlog, and load growth are creating a tri-crisis, dramatically increasing costs and lowering reliability all across the country. Transmission infrastructure must be built at a dramatically higher pace, scale, and geographic scope to ensure the power system is resilient, affordable, and decarbonized.  

But the US grid has been historically built and planned and governed in a fragmented and inconsistent fashion, and energy planning varies dramatically across the country and by state. Because much of grid planning has devolved to the state level, it has become extremely challenging to comprehensively tackle the existential shifts to the sector that the 21st century requires. 

The Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to accelerate the clean energy transformation. Under the IRA, public spending was primarily employed to encourage private investment in green infrastructure. The bill extended and expanded helpful financing mechanisms, but new projects often did not make it to completion. Some energy advocates argue that the biggest stumbling block to unleashing massive clean energy projects from the IRA was, and continues to be, permitting snags. 

Discussions of “permitting reform” have now taken over Congressional debates as the solution to slowdowns in project development and high energy prices. But speeding up permitting is not a silver bullet to building an affordable, clean, and reliable electric grid and other essential infrastructure. Even a perfect permitting reform bill (which the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act or “BAAJA” is decidedly not) would not result in building transmission and clean energy at the pace and scale we need it. BAAJA includes actively harmful provisions that override community input, environmental protections, and public interest considerations and prop up unpopular and underregulated AI data centers.

Regardless of the status of permitting reform, we need a comprehensive approach to diagnosing and planning for a national, public grid. Clean energy projects have been stymied by an array of factors—supply chain snarls, interest rate increases, ineffective and uncoordinated grid planning, community pushback, and a privately controlled electricity transmission system that is managed at cross-purposes with public objectives. As we approach a new horizon for policymaking opportunities, we must accelerate investment in clean power generation in a popular and politically durable fashion. 

Planning a national, public grid would bring more affordable electricity, greater system reliability and resilience, and an accelerated phaseout of fossil fuels. Only progressive grid governance can meet the needs of working people suffering from the broader crises of affordability and escalating climate disasters. A Federal Grid Authority and other major planning, financing, and public control tools can deliver the grid the US needs and deserves. 

The Future of the US Grid by Climate and Community Institute, Open Markets Institute, and Common Wealth will probe the central problems of the US grid today by key leaders in the field and explore why and how building the decarbonized, resilient, and affordable electricity system of the future requires a large-scale, comprehensive, planned industrial policy approach to infrastructure buildout through public direct investment and multiscalar coordination. This brief introduces the tri-crisis of the grid and the need for a public planning approach to resolve it. The wider series will delve deeper into the problems with the existing transmission system and proposals for how to begin to resolve them. We will conclude the series with a policy framework for a Federal Grid Authority and an action plan based on the learnings from the series.