A Tough, Smart Transmission Grid

I attended one of the worst junior high schools outside of Boston: a brick bunker that coughed up generations of underprepared teens. You either came out of there tough, smart, or just lucky to survive.

The tough kids were older, bulkier, and many had rap sheets before they hit 14. The smart kids? Well, we read books, did math, and mostly tried to avoid eye contact. I was one of the smart ones—targeted daily for my lunch money and often pushed around. Too often, my books were knocked out of my arms and scattered across the cracked and weedy pavement of the school yard.

Summer vacation felt like parole.

What I really wanted to be, though, was a tough, smart kid. Smart enough to build, fix, and solve—but tough enough not to get knocked over every time things got rough.

That same idea applies today to our electric transmission grid. We’ve done a lot to make the grid smarter—smart relays, phasor measurement units, EMS, and digital substations. We’ve loaded up on tech. But when the weather gets ugly—or wildfires rage, earthquakes hit, or an ice storm lingers too long—the grid still gets clobbered.

The grid’s getting smarter, but it’s not yet tough enough.

And that is a problem, especially for transmission systems, the critical spine of our electric infrastructure. If the main arteries buckle, it does not matter how many microgrids or how clever substation automation is.

The Transmission Grid Needs Muscle

A smarter transmission grid is undeniably good. But resilience—the tough part—is what keeps the lights on during the worst days. Just ask Texas, or California, or Puerto Rico.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has made this clear. Standards like TPL-001-5 require utilities to consider extreme weather in transmission planning, from ice loading to wildfire risks. And under CIP-014, utilities are also responsible for protecting critical assets against physical attacks.

The mandates are growing, and so are the threats.

But here’s where GIS—Geographic Information Systems—comes in. It can help make the grid not just smart, but tough and strategic. It’s the bridge between engineering resilience and system intelligence.

Know Where It’ll Break Before It Does

Transmission lines are long, complex, and exposed. GIS can create a risk profile that layers together factors like:

• Proximity to wildfire-prone vegetation

• Terrain susceptibility to landslides or floods

• Historical failure data

• Maintenance and inspection history

• Load sensitivity and redundancy

• NERC violation trends

By visualizing vulnerability plus consequence, GIS helps planners make decisions grounded in risk, not guesswork. Owners can’t harden every mile, but they can prioritize what matters most—where risk and consequence intersect.

GIS can model substations against forecasted temperatures, load projections, and transformer cooling performance. To comply with NERC’s latest extreme weather resilience guidelines? GIS gives the “where” for every “what.”

Smarter Spending, Not Just More Spending

Hardening the grid is expensive. Concrete poles, undergrounding, and elevated towers across wetlands cost money. However, targeted resilience investments, guided by spatial intelligence, are far more cost-effective than dealing with failures.

Smart and tough isn’t about buying more gear. It’s about deploying the right gear in the right place.

GIS can track real outage data—during major events—and tie it to spatial regions, using demographic regions to understand the impact on communities, those with the most to lose in a regional blackout. Instead of averaging away the pain, GIS provides the full picture. That data helps justify capital budgets, shapes public policy, and makes NERC audits more proactive than punitive.

Map the Real Cost of Transmission Failures

GIS is essential for resilience – inspections, risk analysis, weather integration, and logistics. These are all essential for the transmission owners and operators. What about the customers? How can GIS articulate the value of transmission resilience?

Let’s start with cost. Not just utility costs but also societal costs.

When a major transmission line fails, it’s not just about tariff payment loss or load shedding. It’s food spoiling across a wide swath. Water systems going offline. Patients on respirators and other essential equipment losing life-saving power. Businesses shutting down. And maybe worst of all—lost trust in a system that’s supposed to be invisible until it’s not.

Transmission owners do a solid job calculating the direct financial cost of an outage, such as equipment repair, lost revenue, and emergency response. But GIS enables something more comprehensive: a spatial, layered analysis of economic, social, and even human impact.

Imagine this: a map that overlays transmission corridors with hospitals, elderly care homes, major commercial centers, AI data centers, EV charging stations, water treatment plants, and critical communication hubs. Now, simulate a cascading failure. What’s the societal hit? GIS shows—not just tells—regulators and the public the true value of a more resilient grid.

When we ask people whether they want to pay more for a tougher grid, the answer is often no—until the lights go out. Then the answer changes. Using spatial analytics to quantify and visualize societal loss might change that conversation before the next blackout hits.

Connecting the Dots with GIS

Smart grids are digital. Tough grids are physical. The transmission grid needs to be both. And GIS is how we connect those dots—between risk and reliability, between smart decisions and strong infrastructure.

We don’t need just a smarter transmission grid. We need a tough, smart one—a grid that doesn’t just think faster, but stands stronger. When I remember junior high, I still wish I’d been one of those tough, smart kids. Now, I can take solace in the fact that GIS helps the grid be both smart and tough.

For more information on how GIS can enable transformation in electric utilities, click here.