Nearly two years have passed since GridLab and the University of California, Berkeley released 2035 and Beyond: Reconductoring with Advanced Conductors Can Accelerate the Rapid Transmission Expansion Required for a Clean Grid, followed soon after by the companion policy paper, Supporting Advanced Conductor Deployment: Barriers and Policy Solutions.
Taken together, these reports offered one of the clearest, most rigorous, and most pragmatic roadmaps yet for how the United States could dramatically expand transmission capacity in the near term while the longer, harder work of greenfield development proceeds in parallel.
Time has only reinforced the importance - and the accuracy - of their conclusions.
The authors, representing GridLab, UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, and Energy Innovation, deserve real credit for elevating reconductoring with Advanced Conductors from a niche engineering solution to a nationally relevant system strategy. At a moment when transmission planning debates often gravitated toward polar extremes - either “we must build everything new” or “we can optimize our way out of the problem” - these reports demonstrated that modern grid expansion requires both ambition and realism.
A Clear Diagnosis of the Transmission Bottleneck
The core insight of the 2035 Report remains strikingly relevant: the transmission grid, not generation technology, is now the primary constraint on the clean energy transition. Even as wind, solar, and storage costs fell precipitously, the U.S. transmission system continued to grow at a historical pace of roughly one percent per year - far below what is required to support electrification, decarbonization, and load growth.
The report’s modeling showed that under realistic assumptions - especially those reflecting ongoing permitting and siting challenges - new greenfield transmission alone would be insufficient to meet 2035 clean electricity goals. Without a complementary strategy, tens of terawatts of low-cost clean energy would remain stranded in interconnection queues, consumer costs would rise, and reliability risks would increase.
Against this backdrop, reconductoring with Advanced Conductors emerged not as a marginal improvement, but as one of the few solutions capable of scaling quickly enough to matter. By upgrading existing lines within existing rights-of-way, utilities could double - or nearly double - transfer capacity in many corridors while avoiding the most time-consuming barriers associated with new transmission construction.
Why Reconductoring Changed the Planning Conversation
What made the 2035 Report particularly compelling was its system-level framing. Advanced Conductors were not presented merely as higher-temperature wire, but as an enabler of an entirely different transmission deployment pathway - one that aligns better with the realities utilities face.
The analysis showed that reconductoring typically costs less than half the price of new lines for comparable capacity increases and can be executed in 18–36 months rather than a decade or more.
In constrained build-out scenarios - arguably the most realistic near-term assumption - the majority of interregional capacity additions through 2035 came not from new towers and corridors, but from reconductored lines.
Perhaps most importantly, the report demonstrated that reconductoring is not in conflict with greenfield transmission. On the contrary, the lowest-cost system outcomes occurred when both strategies were pursued simultaneously, delivering hundreds of billions of dollars in cumulative savings by mid-century while improving reliability and access to clean energy.
That nuance mattered. It reframed Advanced Conductors not as a substitute for long-term transmission investment, but as a way to buy time - time to plan, permit, and construct the new infrastructure the future grid will undeniably require.
Addressing the Harder Question: Why Adoption Has Lagged
If the first report made the technical and economic case, the companion policy paper tackled the more uncomfortable question: why, despite decades of availability and global deployment, have Advanced Conductors been so underutilized in the United States?
The authors deserve particular recognition here. Rather than attributing slow adoption to any single actor or motive, they documented a complex web of institutional, planning, regulatory, and incentive-based barriers that collectively discourage proactive reconductoring.
Among the most critical findings was the misalignment between how utilities are regulated and how Advanced Conductors deliver value. While Advanced Conductors often reduce losses, increase optionality, and provide long-term system benefits, these advantages are not always reflected in near-term planning models or cost recovery mechanisms. As a result, utilities can face structural disincentives to select higher-performance solutions, even when they are clearly superior over the life of the asset.
The report also highlighted workforce constraints, limited planning horizons, conservative equipment standards, and coordination challenges between transmission owners, system operators, and regulators. None of these issues are insurmountable - but together they explain why a technically mature solution can still struggle to achieve scale.
What Has Changed Since the Reports Were Published?
Viewed from today’s vantage point, several developments have only strengthened the original conclusions.
Load growth has accelerated faster than many planners anticipated. Data centers, artificial intelligence workloads, electrified industrial processes, and accelerated electric vehicle adoption are pushing peak demand higher across multiple regions at once. What once looked like a mid-2030s concern is now emerging in near-term forecasts.
At the same time, congestion costs have continued to climb, and interconnection queues remain deeply backlogged. The reality described in the reports - where clean energy is abundant but inaccessible - has become even more pronounced.
There has, however, been meaningful progress. Federal attention to transmission planning has increased, and regional operators are beginning to evaluate portfolios of solutions that include GETs, reconductoring, and advanced planning methodologies. Utilities in several regions have expanded their use of Advanced Conductors, particularly where wildfire mitigation, sag reduction, or rapid capacity expansion is required.
Yet the central tension identified by the policy report remains unresolved. Adoption is still uneven, often project-specific rather than programmatic, and rarely embedded as a default option in long-term transmission planning.
The Path Forward: Integration, Not Either-Or Thinking
What these reports made clear - and what subsequent experience has reinforced - is that solving the transmission challenge will require integration, not incrementalism.
Advanced Conductors deliver the greatest value when they are considered early, evaluated consistently, and deployed alongside complementary Grid Enhancing Technologies such as dynamic line ratings, power flow control, and advanced monitoring systems. Together, these tools allow utilities to extract far more capacity, resilience, and flexibility from existing assets while reducing risk and uncertainty.
Equally important is the need to continue modernizing planning, permitting, and regulatory frameworks so that technologies delivering long-term system value are not disadvantaged by short-term accounting conventions. The policy recommendations outlined nearly two years ago remain highly relevant - and largely actionable - today.
Continuing the Work That Matters
If there is one enduring lesson from these reports, it is this: the energy transition will not be constrained by ideas or technology, but by execution. Advanced Conductors are not experimental. They are proven, widely deployed, and capable of delivering immediate, material benefits at scale.
As transmission owners, system operators, regulators, and policymakers confront the realities of accelerating demand and decarbonization timelines, the need to use every available tool becomes increasingly clear. That means continuing to build new lines where they are essential - but also committing to faster, smarter upgrades of the infrastructure we already have.
The authors and institutions behind these reports provided the industry with a blueprint. The responsibility now lies with all of us to act on it, refining solutions, removing barriers, and deploying Advanced Conductors and Grid Enhancing Technologies at the pace the moment demands.
The case was compelling two years ago. Today, it is unavoidable.