Why It’s Time to Acknowledge That Advanced Conductors Must Become the Backbone of the Modern Grid
I’ve spent more than two decades working side-by-side with utilities around the world, helping them grapple with their transmission systems - performance, resilience, efficiency. In all that time, I have watched the grid evolve faster than the organizations charged with maintaining it have been willing to acknowledge. In fact, I believe we’re at the moment when that reluctance is no longer acceptable.
Here’s the truth: we are now trying to operate a 21st-century, high-demand, climate-challenged grid using assumptions that were drawn in the 1970s. And that matters - because the system is starting to crack.
We are moving far more power, across longer distances, under far harsher conditions, with less operational breathing room than ever before. The explosion of AI-driven data centers, the acceleration of electrification in everything from transport to manufacturing, the emergence of hydrogen hubs and the minute-by-minute flux introduced by massive renewable resources - they are all conspiring to stress a grid built for another era. Meanwhile, extreme heat, intense winter storms, year-round wildfire seasons: they are transforming design margins into potential failure zones.
At the same time, building entirely new transmission lines remains slow, difficult and contentious. So the choice is narrowing: either change fast - or pay dearly for not changing at all.
And yet too many utilities persist in the belief that conductors - built decades ago are “good enough.” The steel-core legacy of ACSR and ACSS is still treated as the baseline. In contrast, modern composite-core conductors - most notably the ACCC® Conductor - are still treated as niche, experimental, optional.
That universe of thinking is over.
Advanced conductors are not niche. They are not experimental. They are not risky. They are necessary - and they are long overdue.
If we are serious about delivering a resilient, reliable, flexible grid for the 2030s and 2040s, we simply cannot continue to operate under legacy assumptions that no longer comport with the grid that we actually have.
The Comfortable Lies We Tell Ourselves
It’s human to cling to what we know. Many planning models still assume that only short lines face thermal constraints, or that long lines are “stability limited” so conductor choice hardly matters. They assume that upgrading conductors implies fundamental structure rebuilds. They treat efficiency improvements as nice-to-have, not must-haves. And they hold fast to the notion that the cheapest material is simply the best choice.
These assumptions persist because they are familiar. They align with decades of habit, they defer difficult conversations, they let internal processes stay unchanged. But familiarity does not equal correctness - and avoiding uncomfortable truths does nothing to reduce risk.
What’s changed is the grid. And the grid we’re operating today simply doesn’t behave like the grid those old models were built to support.
The Grid We Have Doesn’t Fit the Models We Still Use
Load growth is no longer gentle or predictable - it is explosive. Renewable generation has turned formerly stable, one-way corridors into dynamic highways of power flowing in multiple directions. Weather extremes now alter conductor behavior in real time. Transmission lines spend far more time near their thermal limits; operators are increasingly managing robust emergency ratings and sag constraints instead of stability margins.
Because new lines take years - or in many cases decades - to build, reconductoring stands out as one of the only practical tools that utilities can deploy fast enough to keep pace.
At the WGA’s 2025 Annual Meeting, the urgency was laid bare by governors themselves. As outgoing Chair, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham stated:
“It is important that you care about each other and that you respect each other. That’s missing in politics. And as Western governors, we don’t want it to be missing.”
Her remarks, while broad, conveyed a deeper truth: collaboration matters because the grid doesn’t respect state lines, and power flows don’t respect old infrastructure limits.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox, taking the gavel for his upcoming Chair initiative “Energy Superabundance,” carried that energy forward:
“It’s been nearly 50 years since we’ve had this kind of moment: rising demand, available capital, and the political will to build. And that’s exactly what we intend to do.”
And Colorado Governor Jared Polis - at a workshop tied to the initiative - put it plainly:
“We want a lower cost grid, we want a more resilient and reliable grid, and transmission is absolutely critical to achieve that.”
In short: the political window is opening - and the narrative is shifting. The question is whether utilities, regulators and industry will respond with commensurate speed.
The Financial Distortion at the Heart of the Problem
If you ask most utility engineers why they’re still using legacy conductors, the answer often isn’t about physics - it’s about accounting. For decades, return on investment models were built around minimizing capital cost. That made sense in a world of steady loads, predictable flows and mild extremes. But today, those same models hide the true cost of doing nothing: congestion, curtailment, lost deliverability, elevated wildfire exposure, and rising loss penalties.
In the 2025 Brattle Group report, one of the key findings was that on many heavily loaded corridors the economic value of reconductoring with advanced conductors exceeds the entire cost of upgrade - often within the first year.
Yet utilities still find themselves caught in a paradox: once you propose something beyond the bare minimum, regulators instantly raise the specter of “gold-plating.” Advanced reconductoring can break the deadlock - deliver meaningful value without triggering accusations of overbuild. But regulators must evolve too. They must shift from comparing capital cost alone and start rewarding operational performance, loss reduction and risk mitigation.
The Physics Leaves No Doubt
The engineering advantages of advanced conductors - particularly composite-core designs like ACCC® Conductor - are clear. They offer higher capacity, lower thermal expansion, better sag performance, greater strength at elevated temperature, lower resistance, cooler operating temperatures. The lower the resistance, the lower the losses - and losses in today’s heavily loaded corridors are among the most undervalued opportunities in transmission.
The 2024 Berkeley Haas reconductoring study found reconductoring to be the fastest, lowest-cost way to unlock large-scale transmission capacity in the U.S. When you remove the blinders of outdated planning assumptions, the engineering case becomes overwhelming.
Long Lines Are No Longer Just Stability Problems
One of the most persistent misconceptions is that long transmission lines are “stability limited,” so upgrading conductors “won’t matter much.” Yes - long lines always need stability tools: series capacitors, shunt reactors, synchronous condensers, FACTS, and so on. But the idea that stability constraints are the dominant limiting factor is no longer accurate in many heavily loaded grids. Today, many long corridors hit thermal limits, sag and clearance constraints, and emergency-rating limits well before they hit stability ceilings - especially in regions with high renewable penetration, extreme heat, or wildfire risk.
Advanced conductors improve thermal headroom, dynamic line behavior, steady-state impedance, contingency performance, mechanical reliability, and clearance margins under emergency load. Stability tools remain vital - but advanced conductors handle the rest of the challenge.
A Cooler Grid Is a Safer Grid
Wildfire risk now looms over many parts of the western grid. The WGA meetings underscored that infrastructure decisions must now factor in ignition risk. As Governor Lujan Grisham emphasized:
“The grid we have is not the grid we need. We have to move faster.”
Legacy conductors were designed with operating limits of 100 °C for ACSR, or 200-250 °C for ACSS (with steel cores reaching 300 °C in emergencies). At those temperatures, sag increases rapidly, and radiant heat alone can ignite dry vegetation - even without direct contact.
In contrast, ACCC® Conductor operates at an 180 °C max operating temperature, uses a composite core that doesn’t thermally expand, and therefore delivers significantly lower sag, lower radiant heat and dramatically reduced ignition risk. In today’s environment, cooler is not just more efficient - it is materially safer.
The Rest of the World Isn’t Waiting
This is not theoretical. India, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Australia already treat composite-core, high-performance conductors as standard tools - not experimental ones. They adopted them because the physics, the economics and the operating realities demanded it. The United States is now one of the few major grids still clinging to legacy steel-core designs, not because of necessity - but because of habit.
Why the Resistance?
Utilities are conservative by nature for good reason. Reliability demands it. But when conservatism freezes into inertia, the system suffers. Legacy solutions are easier to defend internally. They avoid regulatory scrutiny. They trigger fewer debates. But our environment is shifting faster than our habits. Today the risk of doing nothing is greater than the risk of doing something new.
In control rooms today, operators don’t talk about stability limits. They talk about hot afternoons, sagging clearance, reactive emergency ratings, curtailed flows, red flags flashing on display screens. When constraints are thermal, it no longer makes sense to keep installing conductors optimized for cold-weather, modest-load regimes.
The grid is shouting at us - and we just need to listen.
The Real Value of Advanced Conductors
Advanced conductors unlock a host of immediate and long-term benefits:
They expand capacity on existing corridors, improve efficiency and free up generation, reduce sag and clearance issues, cut emissions and fuel consumption, enhance wildfire safety, enable more renewable integration, delay or avoid the cost of new lines, and improve contingency response and reliability. The Berkeley Haas study identified reconductoring as “the fastest, lowest-cost way” to unlock large transmission capacity in the U.S.
At the 2025 WGA Annual Meeting, Governor Cox captured the moment of truth:
“Rising demand, available capital, and the political will to build. And that’s exactly what we intend to do.”
And Governor Polis reminded the audience:
“Transmission is absolutely critical to achieve that [lower cost, more resilient grid].”
The moment has arrived. The tools are ready. The stakes could not be higher.
Regulation Is Starting to Catch Up
Regulators are beginning to wake up to the fact that simplistic capital-cost comparisons have embedded hidden penalties into our grid: congestion, curtailed renewables, degraded reliability, higher customer bills. That shift in mindset is already under way, and the WGA leadership signaled it strongly.
Governor Lujan Grisham, in her final remarks as Chair, said:
“We don’t want it [respect] to be missing.”
Respect - for each other, for the physical realities of the grid, for the communities served - is now a prerequisite for progress.
The Age of Denial Ends Here
The belief that advanced conductors are optional, niche, experimental is not just outdated - it is dangerous. It increases costs, reduces reliability, elevates wildfire risk, and slows decarbonization.
Advanced conductors are not the future - they are the present. They are already the backbone solution for every region feeling the strain of modern grid operation. The only question is how quickly we choose to act.
The age of denial is ending.
The age of advanced reconductoring has already begun.