T&D POWER Direct

System planners and grid operators are treating extreme heat as an assumed operating condition given new pressures, including drought, demand growth, and fuel concerns. Will it be enough? For decades, the U.S. power system treated extreme heat as a tail risk, managed through seasonal readiness—something for which to prepare. But hotter conditions are now arriving […]

The power generation sector, including electric utilities and grid operators, recognizes the value of moving equipment underground to mitigate outages, lessen risks to assets, and reduce the chances of that equipment causing a wildfire.

Companies are deploying a variety of strategies in efforts to strengthen the power grid against severe weather and other issues.

From EOP-012-3 to Order 587-AB, from Cold Weather Critical Component inventories to dual-fuel conversions, the bulk power system has spent five years rewiring how it prepares for extreme cold. Winter Storm Fern, the latest test, showed the system ran “very close to the edge.” The last five winters have given the North American power sector […]

Extreme weather is making one thing clear—hardening of the power grid alone is not enough to solve the problem of keeping the lights on.

The power sector recognizes the urgent need to harden the power grid, which involves upgrading and fortifying electrical infrastructure to withstand severe weather, cyberattacks, and surging demand for electricity. The U.S. Dept. of Energy is providing billions of dollars to groups involved with modernizing the grid, underscoring the importance of measures designed to support power […]

It’s a known fact that wind power sites across the U.S. eventually will reach the end of their lifecycles. So now what? The industry is coming upon an age where owners and operators must repower these sites by leveraging existing infrastructure to help meet the growing national demand for power. With more than 75,000 turbines […]

Dr. Remy Notermans, director of Strategic Planning for Atom Computing, a Boulder, Colorado-based group developing large-scale quantum computers, recently provided POWER with information about how quantum computing works. Notermans discussed how quantum computing can benefit electric utilities and the power generation sector.

NextEra’s purchase of Dominion Energy, if approved, would have an impact on many areas of the electricity sector. Some analysts told POWER they’re concerned about how it would affect customers’ power bills. Others wonder whether the $67-billion deal s part of a trend that will lead to more mergers and acquisitions in the power space.

Florida-headquartered NextEra Energy, one of the largest U.S. power utilities, is set to buy Virginia-based Dominion Energy in an all-stock deal valued at about $67 billion.

The requests flooding interconnection queues come from data center developers, private equity funds, land brokers, and shell companies, many of whom lack site control, a construction timeline, or even a signed customer. They secure a queue position, bet that powered land will attract a buyer, and wait. The industry calls them “phantom data centers,” and the grid isn’t prepared to handle them.

Utilities are under increasing pressure to move distributed energy resources (DER) through interconnection queues more quickly. In many regions, review timelines have stretched from months into years as requests for solar, storage, and electric vehicle infrastructure continue to rise.

Florida-headquartered Star Catcher Industries said it has raised $65 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round, as the company continues its effort toward building the first space-based power grid. Star Catcher, based in Jacksonville, said the new investment—led by B Capital and co-led by Shield Capital and Cerberus Ventures, the venture arm of Cerberus […]

Grid capacity and the interconnection queue aren’t the only constraints on U.S. data center growth. Community acceptance is becoming the toughest bottleneck to break through, and a hot political topic with the approach of the midterm elections.

Utilities now operate in a far more dynamic environment shaped by distributed energy resources, an increasing number of distributed generation sites, and the emergence of large, high-demand loads and a growing number of connected devices across the grid.

The utilities best positioned to limit outages, liability, and regulatory scrutiny as they mitigate wildfire risk will manage vegetation as an integrated risk intelligence system, directly connected to their network model, enterprise data strategy, and field execution platforms.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has set a June 2026 deadline to act in a high-stakes rulemaking that could redefine how massive new power users—including AI-driven data centers—connect to the U.S. interstate transmission system. In an April 16 order in its “Interconnection of Large Loads to the Interstate Transmission System” docket (RM26-4-000), the commission […]

With the ever-surging demand to power everything from data centers to growing industries, the need to incorporate new energy sources into our grid has never been more pressing, nor challenging.

The Southwest Power Pool (SPP) said it has successfully expanded its service territory. The SPP’s expanded operations took effect on April 1, and tThe regional transmission organization, or RTO, is now aligned with the Western Interconnection of the U.S. power grid.

Though severe weather can happen at any time, April 1 is often considered the start of severe weather season—and now more than ever, utilities need reliable, accessible weather information to keep their staff safe and operations running smoothly.

Electric utilities and energy consumers have discovered the benefits of electrification as a way to decarbonize operations and take advantage of more intelligent power systems. The push for decarbonization

Electricity demand for data centers worldwide is projected to double by 2030. As a result, developers are looking at small modular reactors (SMRs) to add low‑carbon power generation capacity.

Over the past two decades, utilities have invested billions of dollars building a smarter grid—deploying sensors, automated substations, and advanced analytics platforms capable of monitoring system performance in real time.

Electrification has become key for the global move toward cleaner energy, even as government policies continue to impact the use of renewable resources and in some cases embrace continued and even increased support for fossil fuels. Governments and industries wanting to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases look to electrification not only as an environmental […]

America’s power grid is aging into obsolescence. Much of the infrastructure that keeps the lights on today was constructed in the 1960s and 1970s, long before the digital and electrified demands of the 21st century took shape. The consequences are increasingly visible: mounting reliability issues, rising costs, and a growing need to modernize a system never designed for the challenges of climate volatility or the surge in load from data centers and electric vehicles.

With electricity demand projected to rise 25% by 2030 and 78% by 2050 from 2023 levels, utilities are facing a perfect storm—aging infrastructure, climate-driven disruptions, and escalating expectations for reliability and resilience. Meeting this moment will require more than incremental improvement; it demands entirely new sources of capacity, and a fundamental rethink of how the […]

A Texas-headquartered energy company with installations in more than 20 states has brought a utility-scale battery energy storage project online in Maine. Plus Power on February 11 said the group’s 175-MW/350-MWh Cross Town Energy Storage facility is now the largest of its kind in New England.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has released specifications for 26 artificial intelligence (AI) challenges under its Genesis Mission that could reshape how power plants are designed, licensed, built, and operated. Several directly target nuclear plant deployment timelines, grid interconnection bottlenecks, data center load integration, fusion commercialization, and subsurface energy recovery. Launched via executive order on […]

The challenge of upgrading how power is generated, along with needed improvements in electricity transmission and distribution, is being met in a variety of ways by an array of companies.

For decades, utilities have deployed distributed generation along distribution circuits primarily for single-circuit capacity support and voltage regulation. While these applications remain valuable, a broader opportunity is emerging: siting generators directly at substations to unlock system-level benefits that extend far beyond any single feeder. For rural electric cooperatives, municipal power systems, and even investor-owned utilities […]