Few studies in recent memory have so clearly quantified what many in the power sector have long understood intuitively: that every year of delay in building or upgrading our transmission grid costs American consumers and businesses billions in lost value.
In their latest report, The Cost of Delayed Transmission (November 2025), Zach Zimmerman, Rob Gramlich, and Michael Goggin of Grid Strategies LLC, writing for WIRES, deliver a timely and compelling analysis that deserves the attention of every utility executive, policymaker, and transmission planner.
Their work goes beyond rhetoric. It translates delay into dollars – and those dollars add up to staggering national losses that can never be recovered.
Before anything else, it’s worth expressing deep appreciation to Grid Strategies and WIRES for producing this important report. It shines a bright light on a problem that is simultaneously economic, technical, and procedural – and it does so with precision and courage.
The High Price of Inaction
The authors’ analysis draws on eight major benefit-cost studies of transmission portfolios across the United States. Their conclusion is sobering:
“For every $1 billion investment in well-planned, large-scale transmission that is delayed, consumers lose between $150 million and $370 million per year in net benefits.”
These are not abstract numbers. They represent real, unrecoverable consumer losses – higher fuel costs, greater congestion, deferred economic growth, and forgone reliability improvements. Each year of delay not only wastes money; it erodes the efficiency and resilience of the entire grid.
And because most of the benefits from transmission – such as lower congestion and avoided generation investments – are tied to operational efficiencies that accrue only once a project is online, delays mean those benefits are lost forever. They cannot simply be “caught up” later.
As the report puts it: “Operational savings do not accrue retroactively.”
When Delay Becomes a Systemic Risk
The report also underscores how mismatched timelines across the power sector compound the problem. New load can come online within a year or two. Generation, especially renewables, typically takes four to five years to move from interconnection request to operation. But new transmission projects often require six to ten years or more to permit, finance, and construct.
That gap creates a structural vulnerability in America’s energy transition.
The result is a grid that can neither keep up with demand nor connect the new generation resources already in interconnection queues. As Grid Strategies notes, “the time it takes to develop large-scale transmission is one key reason why proactive transmission planning is critical.”
Unfortunately, “proactive” is not a word many would use to describe today’s planning processes.
This timing mismatch – between the speed of demand growth, generation additions, and transmission delivery – poses both an economic drag and a national security risk. It limits access to lower-cost power, slows industrial investment, and leaves communities vulnerable to reliability events and extreme weather.
Transmission Is Economic Policy
The report does an excellent job of situating transmission not merely as an engineering challenge, but as an economic imperative.
Beyond lowering electricity production costs and congestion, well-planned transmission networks strengthen the competitiveness of the U.S. economy. They enable interregional diversity, improve reliability, and enhance the resilience required for an economy increasingly powered by data, electrification, and artificial intelligence.
Each billion dollars in delayed transmission, according to the report, also defers 11,000 to 25,000 job-years – direct, indirect, and induced. That means fewer manufacturing jobs, delayed data center investments, and slower progress on decarbonization.
In other words: transmission delay is not just a grid problem – it’s an economy-wide opportunity cost.
Faster, Smarter Ways to Build Capacity
Grid Strategies stops short of prescribing specific technological solutions, but the implications of their findings are clear. The United States needs faster, lower-impact pathways to expand transmission capacity.
This is where Advanced Conductors – especially CTC Global’s ACCC® Conductor technology – can play a decisive role.
Reconductoring existing transmission lines with high-performance conductors like ACCC® can double the capacity of existing corridors without new rights-of-way or major permitting delays. That means utilities can unlock the economic and reliability benefits of new transmission capacity in a fraction of the time required for traditional line construction.
By directly addressing the timing mismatch that Grid Strategies highlights, ACCC® reconductoring becomes a powerful mechanism for capturing the “lost benefits” their report so carefully quantifies.
Capturing Lost Value Through Efficiency
The report repeatedly emphasizes that benefits lost due to delay are irreversible, particularly when they relate to operational efficiency.
This point aligns perfectly with one of ACCC® Conductor’s greatest strengths: its ability to permanently improve line efficiency and reduce losses by 25–40% compared to legacy ACSR or ACSS conductors.
Those efficiency gains translate directly into lower generation requirements, lower emissions, and reduced congestion costs – the very metrics that Grid Strategies identifies as the economic foundation of transmission benefits.
Moreover, ACCC® Conductor’s carbon-fiber composite core allows it to operate safely at higher temperatures (up to 180°C or higher during emergency conditions) with significantly less thermal sag, maintaining clearance and reliability even under heavy load or extreme heat.
In short, ACCC® Conductor helps utilities achieve – almost instantly – what the Grid Strategies report argues the country cannot afford to delay: more capacity, more efficiency, and greater resilience.
Resilience, Reliability, and National Security
The authors rightly connect transmission reliability to national economic and technological competitiveness, including the ability to support the energy demands of AI and advanced manufacturing.
This theme mirrors recent findings from DOE, EPRI, and the Berkeley Haas Energy Institute, all of which have warned that the U.S. grid is lagging behind the pace of demand growth.
Upgrading existing lines with advanced conductors not only increases capacity – it strengthens the physical resilience of the network. ACCC® Conductor’s non-corrosive core, low thermal expansion, and high strength-to-weight ratio make it inherently more robust under mechanical and thermal stress.
These properties directly support the national resilience objectives that Grid Strategies highlights – without requiring the long timelines associated with new greenfield projects.
From Analysis to Action
While the Grid Strategies report quantifies the cost of delay brilliantly, it leaves the next question open: What can we do about it?
To turn insight into impact, policymakers and utilities might consider the following actions:
- Prioritize Reconductoring in Transmission Planning:
FERC, DOE, and regional planners should recognize advanced conductors as a core strategy for grid expansion – capable of delivering new capacity and efficiency without the delays of new rights-of-way. - Incorporate Cost-of-Delay Metrics into Approvals:
Regulators should explicitly weigh the quantified consumer losses of delay, as presented by Grid Strategies, when reviewing project timelines, permitting disputes, or cost recovery cases. - Align Incentives Around Timely Execution:
Performance-based regulation or incentive mechanisms could reward utilities for deploying capacity-enhancing technologies that deliver benefits faster. - Make Transmission Modernization a National Priority:
As the report notes, the cost of delay ripples far beyond utilities – it affects jobs, competitiveness, and security. Advanced conductors provide a shovel-ready path to meet national objectives.
A Moment That Demands Urgency
The Cost of Delayed Transmission arrives at a pivotal time. Load growth from electrification and data centers is accelerating, generation interconnection queues are overflowing, and utilities are under immense pressure to do more with less.
Grid Strategies and WIRES have quantified what’s at stake. Now the question is how quickly we can respond.
The good news is that we don’t have to wait for entirely new infrastructure to be built. Reconductoring with advanced conductors like ACCC® Conductor offers a highly proven, immediate path to add capacity, reduce losses, and improve resilience – all within existing corridors. If every year of transmission delay costs hundreds of millions in lost value, then every year of accelerated deployment represents the opposite: hundreds of millions gained. The authors of this report have done the nation a service by making that math clear.
It’s now up to us – utilities, policymakers, engineers, and innovators – to act on it.
Acknowledgment:
Special thanks to Zach Zimmerman, Rob Gramlich, and Michael Goggin of Grid Strategies LLC, and to WIRES, for producing The Cost of Delayed Transmission – a study that turns an urgent national challenge into a quantified call to action.
For those of us working to strengthen the grid, this report confirms what we already know: time is money, and delay is loss. Advanced conductors like CTC Global’s ACCC® Conductor make it possible to build the grid we need – faster, smarter, and stronger.
