T&D

For years, virtual power plants (VPPs) were treated by much of the power industry as a promising but niche experiment. A way to aggregate a modest pool of rooftop solar and residential resources and call it a grid resource. That framing no longer holds. In 2025 and through 2026, VPPs have moved much further into […]

GE Vernova announced on Nov. 6 that it has been officially chosen by PowerGrid Corporation of India Limited (PGCIL) to deliver a critical 6-GW High-Voltage Direct-Current (HVDC) transmission corridor. The project was booked in the fourth quarter of 2026. This project will serve as a vital energy highway, enabling the efficient transport of 6 GW […]

It’s now well understood that load growth on the grid is exponential and driven primarily by data centers. A range of generation types are racing to meet this demand. Renewable developers are well-positioned here, finding opportunity built into their existing projects or development pipelines. Land and interconnection positions secured years ago for one purpose are […]

Satellite-based monitoring provides greater visibility of construction activities along the Rilland–Tilburg high-voltage connection, supporting efficient project supervision and targeted field inspections. As the Netherlands accelerates the expansion of its electricity grid to address growing demand and network congestion, transmission system operator TenneT is developing a major new high-voltage connection between Rilland and Tilburg. To help […]

U.S. electricity customers averaged 11 hours of power interruptions in 2024, and major events accounted for 80% of that time, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In recent years, Hurricane Helene left South Carolina residents without power for nearly 53 hours; in August of this year, Gary, Indiana, residents went nearly two weeks without […]

For decades, electric utilities have planned around a relatively predictable relationship between population growth, economic activity, weather and electricity consumption. Demand increased gradually, infrastructure investments followed long-term forecasts and utilities generally had time to prepare for changes in where and how electricity was consumed. That planning model is being tested. The U.S. Energy Information Administration […]

Failure rates have plunged even as installed capacity soars, but a fire that refuses to end at Moss Landing shows how much depends on design vintage, operating limits, and the equipment around the cells. At about 6 a.m. on Sept. 18, 2026, workers at the Moss Landing Power Plant in California spotted a flare-up along […]

Some of the most valuable real estate in the U.S. energy system is hidden in plain sight: the utility corridor. These narrow strips of land carry high-voltage alternating current (HVAC) transmission lines across farmland, suburbs, and industrial parks. They have become increasingly important as it becomes harder to add lines to new land. Building transmission […]

How much more generation will the U.S. need to meet rising electricity demand? It’s an important question, but it isn’t the only one the power industry needs to answer. As data centers, advanced manufacturing, and broader electrification increase demand, the growing challenge is delivering power where and when it is needed. COMMENTARY New generation can […]

A famous aphorism goes like this: “Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result, is one definition of insanity.” In the world of electricity transmission, there is a direct corollary: adding more capital expense to a system that is already inherently broken doesn’t improve it or make it more reliable. That’s […]

The nation’s electric grid depends heavily on foreign-made equipment, much of it from China. Depending on how the Dept. of Energy (DOE) chooses to implement Executive Order 14421 through its pending rulemaking for national security purposes, it has the potential to prohibit fully any Chinese-made equipment on the transmission grid. COMMENTARY The significance of Executive […]

Data centers do what any industry would to continue operations during a power outage: Quickly pivot to their own emergency energy. As reported in several media outlets, a 10-minute grid outage in late July of this year on the East Coast caused data centers to hop off the main grid and switch over to their […]

Four years after separating from Constellation Energy, Exelon is expanding its transmission business and pressing for a greater role in power generation. Executive Vice President Carim Khouzami explains why rising data center demand, tightening capacity reserves, and shortcomings in PJM’s wholesale markets are changing the utility company’s strategy. When Exelon completed its separation from Constellation […]

Severe weather conditions have become constant. Cyclones, storms, heatwaves, floods, and droughts continue to put critical infrastructure, homes, livelihoods, and lives at risk in the U.S. and around the world. Heat waves and droughts are the second-deadliest weather category, causing critical infrastructure instability, power line inefficiency, thermal sagging, and overloaded transformers that can lead to […]

Over 2,060 gigawatts. That is the staggering volume of generation and storage capacity currently trapped waiting in U.S. interconnection queues. According to data from RMI, the typical project now takes almost five years—stuck in administrative and transmission review before a single watt can be delivered to the grid. In 2008, it was only two years. For […]

  This customer webinar brings together engineering and IT leaders from Eversource, Great River Energy, and Hoosier Energy to share how their utilities moved from fragmented drawing storage to centralized Engineering Document Management. Through firsthand experiences, the panel explores the risks of shared drives, paper drawings, conflicting revisions, and tribal knowledge—and how a single source […]

  This playbook explores how utilities can use Engineering Document Management (EDM) to improve access to critical engineering information, connect teams, automate workflows, and reduce operational risk. Drawing on real-world experiences from Con Edison, Eversource Energy, Great River Energy, and Hoosier Energy, it demonstrates how centralized document control supports everything from design and capital projects […]

Restoring customer supply is not the same event as restoring a process plant. Sarnia’s 2003 outages show why power-system resilience has to be carried through safe shutdown, utilities, environmental controls, and staged restart. The Grid Event Was Only the First Failure State At 4:11 p.m. on Aug. 14, 2003, the Northeast blackout began to pull […]

A high-voltage insulator can look unchanged for years while its operating environment steadily alters the conditions on its surface. Salt carried inland from a coast, industrial residue, road dust, moisture, ultraviolet radiation, and repeated weather cycles create an exposure history that can influence electrical performance and maintenance demands long before an asset reaches a predetermined […]

Moving Tasmania’s abundant renewable power to the mainland means threading a subsea and underground cable through farmland, coastline, and Victoria’s Latrobe Valley—each stretch carrying its own

  Data centers face big challenges, from processing trillions of search queries, storing billions of emails and photos and serving countless hours of video every day while at the same time developing ways of decreasing their energy and carbon footprints and increasing data security. In this episode, Angad Sandhu, CTO of Giga Energy (director of […]

  Data centers commonly deploy looped medium-voltage (MV) distribution systems with automated protection and control schemes to deliver exceptionally high levels of power availability. However, these automation schemes rely on communications infrastructures where latency and scalability can affect fault-response performance. This paper presents a robust, hybrid FLISR strategy that integrates centralized and decentralized control to […]

For most of the last century, electricity and heat have been planned and regulated as two separate systems, a design choice that made sense when both were produced by burning fuel on demand. However, that design is a poor match for how the grid actually runs today. Generation, transmission constraints, and price all shift by […]

This article presents a practical four-phase engineering methodology for migrating legacy transmission substations toward adaptive protection architectures in power systems with high distributed energy resource (DER) penetration. Increasing DER integration introduces significant challenges to conventional protection schemes, including bidirectional power flow, dynamic fault current behavior, relay coordination complexity, and reduced protection reliability in aging substations. […]

North Carolina State University, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), and EPRI have demonstrated a megawatt-class solid-state transformer (SST) on a live 13.2-kV utility distribution feeder, marking what the partners describe as the first independent validation of a megawatt-class SST under real-world distribution conditions. The NC State-built prototype was connected at EPRI’s power delivery laboratory […]

From two-year bushing lead times and hyperscaler demand to U.S. manufacturing expansion and the emerging 765-kV build-out, Trench Group CEO Bahadir Basdere explains where high-voltage equipment supply is under the most pressure. High-voltage grid components are becoming a critical constraint as utilities, transmission developers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and hyperscalers compete for equipment needed to […]

Construction of the final segment of the Southwest Intertie Project, a 576-mile transmission corridor connecting an area from Idaho to just south of Las Vegas, Nevada, is underway. Officials celebrated the latest milestone for the installation during a groundbreaking ceremony in Ely, Nevada, on September 3.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the domestic power system is facing mounting pressure from growing electricity demand, a backlog of generation interconnection requests, and an aging transmission

Electricity grids historically have been relatively predictable systems. Power flowed in one direction, from centralized generation facilities through transmission and distribution networks to homes and

More than 3 GW of data center load left the PJM system on July 22, 2026, after a single transmission fault. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) investigated the same failure mode in 2024 and found that utility equipment shed none of it. Customer-side protection did all of it. Those settings are about to […]