Why Transmission Pricing Reform Must Protect Consumers While Accelerating Capacity
The recently released report, Federal Transmission Pricing Volume 2: Options for Ensuring Affordability and Reliability in an Era of High Load Growth, authored by Sophie Meyer, Gretchen Kershaw, John D. Wilson, and Rob Gramlich of Grid Strategies, offers a timely and highly practical contribution to one of the most important energy policy conversations now facing the United States.
CTC Global commends the authors, Grid Strategies, the Electricity Customer Alliance, Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, FERC, state regulators, utilities, large energy users, consumer advocates, regional transmission organizations, and the many stakeholders working to address the difficult but essential question at the center of this report: how can the electric industry serve rapid load growth without unfairly shifting costs to existing customers?
A New Question at the Center of Grid Policy
That question is no longer theoretical.
Across much of the country, utilities and grid operators are seeing unprecedented requests for electric service from data centers, artificial intelligence facilities, advanced manufacturing, industrial electrification, transportation electrification, and other large loads. These new customers can bring jobs, investment, tax revenue, economic development, and broader system benefits. They can also help spread fixed grid costs over more electricity sales, potentially easing rate pressure for existing customers.
But those benefits are not automatic.
As the Grid Strategies report makes clear, the outcome depends heavily on planning, timing, cost allocation, tariff design, transparency, and regulatory coordination. New load can help lower average system costs when existing infrastructure is better utilized and when new customers pay an appropriate share of the costs they cause. But new load can also create risk if utilities must commit major capital before projects materialize, if customers delay or downsize, or if transmission costs are spread across existing customers without adequate visibility into who caused those costs and who benefits from them.
Why Volume 2 Matters
This is where Volume 2 adds important value.
Rather than simply arguing that more transmission is needed, the report examines how transmission costs are approved, allocated, recovered, and translated through federal and state regulatory frameworks. It recognizes that state large-load tariffs will remain a critical tool for protecting consumers, but it also explains why state regulation alone may not be sufficient when FERC-jurisdictional transmission costs cross state boundaries, flow through regional cost allocation mechanisms, or emerge from planning processes that are not fully visible to state regulators.
The report organizes its recommendations around several categories of policy options, including timing-of-funding mechanisms, local transmission cost recovery reforms, regional cost allocation approaches, and more innovative models for proactively planning and reserving transmission capacity. These options are not presented as a single prescription. Instead, they are offered as a framework for serious discussion, recognizing that different regions may need different solutions.
That balanced approach is important.
The industry should avoid the false choice between blocking large new loads to protect consumers and approving every request without adequate safeguards. The better path is to insist on both affordability and expansion. Large customers seeking fast access to the grid should make meaningful commitments. Existing customers should not be left holding the bag if speculative projects fail to materialize. At the same time, transmission planning should not become so narrow or reactive that it misses opportunities to build infrastructure that delivers broader regional benefits.
In other words, the goal should not be merely to assign costs after the fact. The goal should be to plan smarter, build faster, allocate costs fairly, and maximize the value of every dollar invested.
Fairness Must Include Efficiency
That is also where advanced transmission technologies deserve closer attention.
Transmission pricing policy should not only determine who pays for infrastructure. It should also encourage utilities and planning regions to choose solutions that deliver more capacity, more quickly, at lower total cost and with less permitting risk. Grid Enhancing Technologies, advanced monitoring systems, topology optimization, power flow control, and high-performance advanced conductors can all help increase the capacity and efficiency of the existing grid.
High-performance advanced conductors such as CTC Global’s ACCC® Conductor are especially relevant because many of today’s constraints are not abstract policy problems. They are physical limitations on existing lines, structures, corridors, clearances, and thermal ratings. In many cases, reconductoring existing transmission lines with advanced conductors can substantially increase capacity without requiring entirely new rights-of-way. These projects can often be completed faster than traditional greenfield transmission development, while also reducing line losses, improving reliability, lowering sag, and increasing operational flexibility.
This matters directly to the affordability concerns raised in the report.
If large new loads require grid expansion, the industry should prioritize solutions that reduce total system costs and accelerate energization. If existing customers are concerned about paying for infrastructure needed by new customers, regulators should ask whether lower-cost, faster-to-deploy alternatives have been fully evaluated. If policymakers are focused on fairness, they should also focus on efficiency, because inefficient infrastructure choices ultimately become a ratepayer issue.
A Practical Framework for the Next Phase of Reform
The report’s guiding principles support this broader view. Transmission pricing should allow appropriate cost recovery, preserve open access, promote economic efficiency, align with cost causation and beneficiary-pays principles, and remain administratively feasible, fast, and transparent. These are not merely legal or regulatory concepts. They are practical tests for whether the industry can meet the moment.
A pricing framework that protects consumers but slows needed infrastructure indefinitely will not solve the problem. A framework that accelerates infrastructure but ignores cost responsibility will lose public confidence. A framework that focuses only on new construction while overlooking advanced technologies may spend more money than necessary and take longer than the economy can afford.
The better answer is an integrated one.
Large-load customers should make durable financial commitments. Utilities and regional planners should improve transparency and forecasting. Federal and state regulators should coordinate more closely. Transmission cost allocation should recognize both cost causation and broad system benefits. And advanced technologies should be evaluated early and seriously as part of the least-cost, fastest-available toolkit for serving load growth.
Speed, Affordability, and the Existing Grid
The United States is entering a period in which electric infrastructure will increasingly determine economic competitiveness. Data centers, AI, manufacturing, electrification, and energy security all depend on a grid that can deliver more power, more reliably, and more affordably. The question is not whether transmission investment will be needed. It will be. The question is whether that investment will be planned well, allocated fairly, and deployed quickly enough.
Grid Strategies’ Volume 2 report provides a thoughtful framework for answering that question.
CTC Global applauds the authors and sponsors for advancing this important discussion. As policymakers and regulators consider the next generation of transmission pricing reforms, we encourage them to keep one additional principle in mind: fairness and speed must work together.
Consumers deserve protection from unjustified cost shifts. Large new customers deserve clear pathways to reliable electric service. Utilities deserve the opportunity to recover prudent investments. And the country deserves a modern transmission system capable of supporting economic growth, reliability, resilience, and affordability.
Achieving all of that will require better pricing policy, stronger planning, clearer commitments, and faster deployment of proven technologies already available today.
Advanced conductors and other grid-enhancing solutions cannot solve every transmission challenge. But they can help solve many of the most urgent ones faster than conventional approaches alone. In an era of high load growth, that speed may prove just as important as cost allocation itself.
