Why a U.S. national electric grid would be great for the climate — and is nearly impossible
A transmission tower is seen on July 11, 2022 in Houston, Texas. ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) is urging Texans to voluntarily conserve power today, due to extreme heat potentially causing rolling blackouts.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
This story is part of CNBC’s “Transmission Troubles” series, an inside look at why the aging electrical grid in the U.S. is struggling to keep up, how it’s being improved, and why it’s so vital to fighting climate change.
Building large-scale transmission lines that carry electricity across the United States has the potential to be an extremely cost-effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while also improving reliability of the country’s energy grid.
But the energy grid in the U.S. has developed over decades as a patchwork of thousands of individual utilities serving their own local regions. There is no incentive for energy companies to see the forest for the trees.
“The system we have for planning and paying for new transmission does not adequately value or promote the vital benefits of interregional transmission. Transmission planning does not sufficiently take into account the benefits of a holistic system over the long term,” Gregory Wetstone, CEO of the non-profit American Council on Renewable Energy, told CNBC.
The regulatory framework that has evolved surrounding those local utilities and their electricity transmission processes completely short-circuits when it comes to planning longer, bigger-scale transmission lines.
“Lines crossing multiple states have to receive permits from many local and state agencies, and a single county can block the construction of a new transmission line that would benefit the entire region,” Wetstone told CNBC. “Imagine trying to build the national highway system that we now have if any single county along the way could block the entire project. It simply wouldn’t have been possible.”
The Department of Energy is in the process of conducting a National Transmission Planning Study,to look into all of this. The government’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory are working on executing that work, but the results of that study will not be published for some time, a NREL researcher told CNBC.
Unless the U.S. can modernize its electric grid and update the regulatory processes surrounding construction of new lines, the country’s climate goals will be harder and more expensive to achieve.
Why a macro-grid is a cost-effective climate win
Currently, electricity generation results in 32 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States .To mitigate the effects of global warming, electrical generation needs needs to move from burning fossil fuels, like oil and coal, to emissions-free sources of energy, like wind and solar.
One way of reducing emissions caused by electricity is to build as much clean energy generation as close as possible near to where the electricity is needed.
But building longer transmission lines, to carry wind and solar power from regions where those resources are abundant to the places where demand is highest, would actually be a cheaper way of reducing emissions.
“Multi-regional transmission designs enable the highest reduction in cost per unit of emissions reduction,” James McCalley, an electrical engineering professor at Iowa State University, told CNBC.
There are three reasons why:
Tapping into the most abundant resources. First, large-scale, multi-regional transmission lines — often called a “macro grid” — would connect the most powerful renewable energy sources with the highest demand centers, McCalley said.
“Many mid-U.S. states have excellent wind resources, and the southwest U.S. has excellent solar resources, but the population is insufficient to use them,” McCalley told CNBC. “Population density rises as you get closer to the coasts. Transmission lets you build rich resources and use them at the heaviest load centers.”
Heavy electrical transmission lines at the powerful Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, located in California’s Mojave Desert at the base of Clark Mountain and just south of this stateline community on Interstate 15, are viewed on July 15, 2022 near Primm, Nevada. The Ivanpah system consists of three solar thermal power plants and 173,500 heliostats (mirrors) on 3,500 acres and features a gross capacity of 392 megawatts (MW).
George Rose | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Balancing supply with demand over time zones and seasons. Second, transmission lines that span time zones would let the most effective power generating resources go to the region that needs the power when it needs it. “During the course of a 24 hour period, regions in different time zones peak at different times, and so the best resources in one non-peaking region and be used to supply demand at another peaking region,” McCalley told CNBC.
Similarly, large scale transmission would allow regions to share power generation to meet their annual capacity needs.
“Regions today require that they have total installed capacity equal to about 1.15 times their annual peak load. But the annual peak load occurs at different times of the year for different regions. So multi-regional transmission would enable sharing of capacity,” McCalley told CNBC.
For example, the Pacific Northwest peaks in energy demand in early spring and the Midwest peaks during summer months. They could, if connected, borrow from each other, “enabling each region to avoid constructing new capacity,” McCalley said.
Better reliability. Finally, improved energy sharing would also lead to a more reliable energy grid for consumers.
“After decades of underinvestment, our current grid is ill-equipped to handle the energy transition or increasingly frequent severe weather events,” Wetstone told CNBC. So in addition to making clean energy available cheaply, “a macro grid would also allow for the transfer of energy to prevent blackouts and price spikes during extreme weather events,” Wetstone said.
A 2021 NREL study, “Interconnections Seam Study,” found benefit-to-cost ratios that reach as high as 2.5, meaning for each dollar invested in transmission that connects the major components of the U.S. power grid — the Western Interconnection, the Eastern Interconnection, and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas — would return up to $2.50.
Here is a visualization from the National Renewable Energy Lab’s “Interconnections Seam Study” showing how transmission lines that connect the major regions of the U.S. power system could allow the US to access more renewable energy and allow regions to balance energy demand.
Graphic courtesy National Renewable Energy Lab
Why the US does not have a macro, cross-regional grid
“Who pays for transmission I think is the biggest problem,” Rob Gramlich, the founder of the transmission policy company Grid Strategies, told CNBC. “It’s a freaking mess,” he said.
Currently, transmission lines that are constructed in the U.S. have to go through a years-long planning, approval and regulatory process where all of the utilities, regulators and landowners determine who benefits and how much each beneficiary should pay.
“Figuring out how to share costs among the many parties that would benefit from (and be impacted by) new transmission can be contentious, as can navigating permitting processes at the county, state, and federal levels along new routes,” explains Patrick Brown, a researcher working on transmission issues at the NREL.
In addition, local stakeholders often dig in their heels in when a new transmission line has the potential to undercut their existing business.
“The majority of new transmission is built for local needs and disconnected from any regional or interregional planning. Not surprisingly, the owners of these local projects seek to protect their transmission and generation earnings from being reduced by less expensive renewable resources that would be brought onto the grid as a result of interregional transmission,” Wetstone told CNBC. “So the broader societal benefits of a larger and more resilient grid are often ignored.”
It will be especially challenging to determine exactly who benefits exactly how much for a transmission line that spans the entire country.
“The system in and of itself is a benefit to the nation,” McCalley told CNBC. “The principle of ‘beneficiaries pay’ is harder to implement in that case.” So there’s no clear answer yet on how a macrogrid line would be paid for.
“My view has been the federal government, in concert with state government, in concert with developers — that it’s got to be a coordinated, complementary division of funds somehow, between those three, and whether it’s 95-5, or 30-30-40 percentage, I don’t know,” McCalley said.
For example, the larger utility companies in the US (like PG&E, American Electric Power Company, Duke Energy, or Dominion) could partner with the companies that make this kind of transmission technology, and with federal power authorities (like the Bonneville Power Administration, Western Area Power Administration, Southeastern Power Administration and Southwestern Power Administration) to coordinate a macro-grid construction project, McCalley said.
The cooling towers at the Stanton Energy Center, a coal-fired power plant in Orlando, are seen near electrical transmission towers. The facility is projected to convert from burning coal to using natural gas by 2027. U.N. climate talks ended on November 13, 2021 with a deal that for the first time targeted fossil fuels as the key driver of global warming, even as coal-reliant countries lobbed last-minute objections.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
‘Get them in one room’
Despite the current morass of planning and building transmission lines in the U.S., “there are also many ways to overcome these barriers,” Brown at NREL told CNBC.
“Existing rights-of-way can be reused; new federal guidelines could encourage proactive interregional planning and coordination and help identify the highest-priority expansion options; and public engagement and community ownership can help get local stakeholders onboard.”
Regulators ought to be forced to work together, according to Konstantin Staschus, who has been working with transmission for his entire career, both in the U.S. and in Europe.
When the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, one of seven regional planning agencies in the United States, plans transmission line construction plans, it starts with a massive meeting. At the kickoff for its next round of transmission planning, MISO had a three hour planning meeting with 377 people in the meeting.
In the same way all of those stakeholders are pushed together to hash out their differences, so too should that happen for larger scale planning, according to Staschus, who was the Secretary-General of Europe’s transmission planning body, the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, for the first eight years of the regulatory body’s existence, from 2009 to early 2017.
“Get them in one room. Make them plan nationally. Make them redo it every year,” Staschus told CNBC.
“If they do that and if they’re experts — scratch their heads for months, figure out all the data and argue about the assumptions and the cost allocation, and they come with a proposal to their own management and convince them and then the management goes together to the various regulators and convinced them,” then the U.S. will be on a better path, Staschus told CNBC.
“But if you don’t treat it like a countrywide system, you won’t start this process.”
For Johnson of MISO, though, these kinds of idealistic discussions of building a national system come from people who don’t truly understand the challenge of getting a transmission line built even on a regional basis. For instance, the lines might run through entire states that don’t pull energy from that system.
“Those things are going to be far more complicated than what people are aware,” Johnson said. The challenge is not designing a transmission line, Johnson says, the challenge is determining who benefits how much and how much they have to pay.
What Johnson sees as more likely is stronger connections at the seams from one planning region to another. “I think of it kind of like a bucket brigade,” Johnson said, where one region can more seamlessly share power with its next door neighbor.
Jesse Jenkins, who is Princeton professor and a macro-scale energy systems engineer, says that while national-level grids are attractive, these interregional grids are essential.
“I don’t think we necessarily need a continent-scale macro grid, although there are plenty of studies showing the benefits of a such a ‘interstate highways’ system for transmission, so it would be nice to have,” Jenkins said. “What we absolutely need is a substantial increase in key inter-regional long-distance transmission routes. So it’s not all local lines (e.g. within single states). We need a lot of new or expanded/reconductored multi-state corridors as well.”
If the US can’t get national lines built, then interregional lines are better than nothing, agrees McCalley. But emissions reductions will remain more expensive than if we built a national grid.
“If we rely on what we have done in the past, it would be really hard because every state weighs in, and every state gets veto power, essentially. And so that won’t work,” McCalley said.
The world’s third-largest auto group is going all-in to lead the shift to electrification. With plans to pour a record over $16.6 billion into advancing new tech and EVs in South Korea, Hyundai is laying the groundwork for the future. Can the new investment help it surpass Volkswagen or Toyota in global sales?
Hyundai Motor Group, including Kia, announced on Thursday that it will “make the largest annual investment in its history in Korea this year.”
In 2025, Hyundai plans to invest KRW 24.3 trillion, or over $16.6 billion, in its home market. This is up 19% from the previous record of KRW 20.4 trillion (about $14 billion) set in 2024.
Hyundai said the reason behind the record investment “is because it believes that continuous and stable investment is essential to overcome the crisis and secure future growth engines.” A big part of the crisis Hyundai is referring to started last month.
After President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law and was later impeached on December 14, South Korea plunged into a political crisis. Korean buyers are hesitant to make big purchases, which has slowed demand.
Hyundai’s global sales slipped nearly 2% in 2024. Although sales outside of Korea were roughly flat, domestic sales were down 7.5%.
To boost growth in 2025, the auto giant is pouring resources to accelerate the development of new tech, EVs, and software.
Hyundai is doubling down on new EVs and tech
Hyundai said its focus this year is “on new business areas such as development of next-generation products, securing key new technologies, and accelerating electrification and SDV.”
The company will invest KRW 11.5 trillion ($7.9 billion) into R&D “to secure key future capabilities such as improving product competitiveness, electrification, SDV, hydrogen products, and development of original technologies.”
Another KRW 12 trillion ($8.2 billion) will be used to ramp up domestic EV production and improve manufacturing. Hyundai plans to continue making large-scale investments to build EV-only facilities in 2025.
Last year, Kia began production at its new Gwangmyeong EVO Plant, where it builds the new EV3. Later this year, Kia will start mass production of its PBV electric vans.
Hyundai will open its dedicated EV plant in Ulsan in the first half of 2026. The company plans to mass produce EVs, starting with an ultra-large electric SUV.
In the US, its most important market, Hyundai just opened its new $7.6 billion EV plant in Georgia. The first vehicle to roll off the assembly line was the upgraded 2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5, which now has more range, better style, and a NACS port for charging at Tesla Superchargers.
Hyundai will begin building its first three-row electric SUV, the IONIQ 9, in Georgia in Q1 2025. The larger electric SUV will be available in the US and Korea in the first half of 2025.
With several Hyundai Motor, including Kia and Genesis, EVs now eligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit, can Hyundai gain an advantage over the competition?
Hyundai is also the first company to sell its vehicles on Amazon in the US. The new 2025 IONIQ 5, IONIQ 6, and Kona Electric can now be purchased directly on Amazon’s website.
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Last month, I had the chance to visit Los Angeles and attend Micromobility America, a yearly industry tradeshow focusing on e-bikes, e-scooters, and other small-format vehicles. To get around the city for a few days, I borrowed a VMAX VX2 Extreme from VMAX’s Los Angeles distribution center and it made all the difference in navigating a city that is notoriously hard to get around.
My regular readers and viewers will know I’m an e-bike first guy, but that I won’t say “no” to any form of micromobility. I’ve ridden almost everything, so you can bet that I count electric scooters in my stable, too, even if it’s predominantly comprised of e-bikes. And I must say that there’s something nice about being able to stash your scooter in the trunk of an Uber or under a train seat when necessary.
While in LA, I was excited to finally get a chance to review a VMAX scooter, since I’ve followed the company’s US expansion with interest over the last year or so. As a Swiss-based company, VMAX first found success in Europe before expanding into the US with larger and more powerful models.
The company let me borrow a VX2 Extreme electric scooter, which is a 25 mph (40 km/h) scooter that is surprisingly powerful. It doesn’t look much bigger than a dirt-cheap GoTrax or similar budget scooter, yet it is much faster and more powerful—to the tune of 1,600W of peak power.
You can see how it rides in my video review below, or keep reading for the whole story.
VMAX VX2 Extreme Video Review
Becoming a scooter guy in LA
LA is notorious for being difficult to navigate, and even if you have a car, that doesn’t mean you’ll be getting anywhere quickly. Depending on who you ask, the public transportation system is either a trainwreck or somewhat decent, though no one will tell you LA has well-developed public transit.
That’s why I knew I wanted to be able to rely as much as possible on my own independent transportation while in the city, and a scooter made sense. With the VMAX’s 25 mph top speed, I could keep up with most city traffic, yet I could still easily stow it to fit in the trunk of a rideshare car or stash it in my hotel room without drawing much notice from the front desk.
My trip started with visiting VMAX’s distribution center in downtown LA, which had me taking a 30-minute walk that was both refreshing and a great reminder of how slow it is to get around a massive metropolitan area on foot alone. Don’t get me wrong – I love walking and I also use jogging as my primary form of exercise. But a pair of shoes just isn’t a very fast or efficient transportation method in a big city.
After getting to tour VMAX’s large warehouse and see how they fulfill customer orders from all over the US (as well as get a look at several different models they offer), the team let me borrow a VX2 Extreme and sent me on my way. My next stop was an event down in Costa Mesa near Irvine, which Google Maps told me would be a 43-mile (69 km) journey from Downtown LA, and which just so happened to be the exact range of the longest range version of the VX2 Extreme scooter (it comes with three battery options of between 28-43 miles of range depending which battery size you choose).
However, those range ratings are rarely at the scooter’s maximum speed and power level, which I intended to be rocking for most of the trip. But Google Maps suggested to me that it would be an easy train ride instead, with just a couple miles of scooting to and from the train station on either end. Awesome!
I scooted on over to the train station and arrived just in time… to miss the train by two minutes. No worries, back home there’s a train every 10 minutes or so. I checked the train schedule and to my horror, the next train wasn’t scheduled for more than two hours from now. Thanks, LA.
I didn’t have that kind of time – I’ve got a micromobility conference to get to! So I had to swallow my pride and order an Uber. Fortunately the scooter folded up and fit easily in the trunk along with my travel backpack and my camera backpack. That’s not something I can normally do on my e-bikes!
Forty-something miles later, I was in Costa Mesa with time to spare, which I spent happily burned by scooting around. It was my first chance to spend more than a couple of rushed minutes riding the scooter more pleasurably to get a real feel for it. The VX2 Extreme doesn’t have suspension but still felt quite good on the city streets, even when hopping the occasional curb or speed bump.
The build is obviously quite robust, without giving me the rickety feeling I get on cheaper quality scooters. And the power is surprisingly potent. When I put the scooter in its highest power setting, known as Beast Mode, I would often accidentally wheelie it while starting, since I tend to keep my rear foot on the board and push off with my front foot. Those wheelies were fun, but I decided to mostly scoot around in one notch below the highest power mode, as that felt more reasonable for everyday riding. But it’s nice to know you’ve got more power than you need, instead of merely maxing it out 100% of the time.
As the winter sun set quickly, it gave me my first chance to check out the lighting and turn signals on the scooter. Those turn signals are actually quite bright during the day, lighting up the handlebar ends up high for better visibility, as well as motorcycle-style turn signals down low on the rear of the scooter. The rear turn signals are flexibly mounted, meaning they can bend and bounce back into position instead of breaking when they inevitably hit something.
The turn signals were weirdly impressive. You can see in the image above how the lower ones light up the road and the upper ones are quite visible by sticking out to the sides on the handlebar ends.
Normally, I deride most e-bike and e-scooter turn signals because they’re typically diminutive and unclear, mostly serving as a flashing light so close to the vehicle’s centerline that they don’t achieve their goal of actually indicating direction. But VMAX has done a great job with these, as they’re both attention-grabbing and clearly indicate that you’re about to turn—which is important when quickly riding around cars at night.
I also found the speed of the scooter to be both a blessing and a curse. I forgot that LA weather isn’t always “Santa Monica in June”, and I was absolutely freezing in my hoodie – the only garment with long sleeves that I had packed.
Flying fast at 25 mph down wide Costa Mesa roads wasn’t helping, with that airstream cooling me even further. I had to decide between going faster to get to dinner sooner at the risk of turning into an icicle along the way or slowing down to cut the windchill. Unfortunately, the battery was so large that I couldn’t use the efficiency argument to encourage me to slow down, so I just continued bombing it down to the Balboa Peninsula at 25 mph, meeting up with friends to offer freezing cold handshakes and high-fives. Dinner was great, but the ride back was even colder. I thought I might go slower climbing the hills on the way back from the coast, but the dang thing zipped up the hills fast enough to keep my fingers feeling like they were encased in ice. But hey, at least the fast speed meant I could shorten the trip as much as possible!
The next day, I scooted to the show in the morning and found that the fairgrounds where it was hosted were closed off at most entrances. I guess they do this to limit how cars can enter (and ensure everyone gets charged to park), but I was an elitist with my own right-sized transportation and not about to let things like traffic control stop me!
Some scooting across the weeds and carrying the 45 lb (21 kg) scooter over a couple barricades later, I was in! I’m not saying you should ride in places you aren’t allowed, but just that there’s an advantage to being able to take creative routes when the vehicle you drive weighs as much as your leg.
I locked up at a bike rack and made it to the show in record time, taking full advantage of the fact that micromobility vehicles often allow you to chart your own path.
That was how I got around for next two days, putting around 30 miles (50 km) on the scooter. I charged it each night at my hotel, but I never used more than 30% of the battery, so I’m not sure I really needed to charge it all.
Ultimately, the VMAX VX2 Extreme scooter proved to be an ideal way to navigate the city. I took it on many rides, both for my morning and evening commute, as well as to meet up with friends and simply scooting around for pleasure. It always offered me more than I needed, both in terms of power and range, and felt comfortable while doing it. The 10″ tubeless pneumatic tires have enough squish to give me some comfort on rougher patches and are large enough diameter to handle all the sidewalk cracks and minor potholes I threw at them.
Basically, I was pretty darn happy with it. Of course you pay more for such a well-built scooter from a Swiss company, to the tune of $899, but it seems quite fair to me. It’s a long range and incredibly powerful scooter that hides in a surprisingly portable package, easy enough for me to toss in a vehicle or carry over a chain barricade. And with the extra features like safety lighting with turn signals, the 1,600W of peak power, the easily readable 4″ color TFT screen, the weather-sealed drum brakes combined with electric motor braking, and the stable folding design, the scooter treated me better than well for my three days riding it around central and southern LA.
VMAX has other even more affordable models starting from around $400, but I’d say the VX2 Extreme is a great Goldilocks option that offers more power and range than most people need in a portable package at a fair price.
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Tesla is about to release a design refresh for Model Y, its most popular model, and it raises an important question: can it reignite Tesla’s growth?
Fortunately, we have a good recent comparison since Tesla refreshed the Model 3 last year.
Tesla doesn’t break down sales per model so we have to rely on third-party data to track Model 3 sales.
There are varying estimates, but most of them are putting Tesla Model 3 sales between 500,000 and 530,000 units in 2023 prior to the refresh.
In 2024, estimates are putting sales at roughly the same.
Tesla delivery analyst TroyTeslike has data pointing to 520,000 Model 3 deliveries in 2024. The production changeover has certainly affected sales in the first of the year, but it looks like production and deliveries peaked in Q3 as Troy has Model 3 at the same volume of about 149,000 units in Q3 and Q4.
As with all other Tesla models, the peaked delivery volumes were also achieved with record incentives and discounts in Q4.
Can Model Y refresh be different?
Model 3 refresh didn’t help the program that much. It is virtually doing the same delivery volumes it was last year, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the same will happen with Model Y.
A lot of that depends on the refresh itself.
Earlier today, we had our best look at the refresh so far, and it is similar to the Model 3 refresh in the sense that it features new headlights and taillights, although different ones than Model 3, including light bars, as well as a more aggressive front-end.
The level of exterior changes is similar to the Model 3 refresh in terms that it is significant but not massively different either.
Tesla didn’t go into too many details about “under the hood” changes with the Model 3 refresh, but it did feature an improved suspension, a quieter cabin, and a slight increase in efficiency.
We can expect similar improvements to the Model Y.
There were some changes that people saw as negative, with the main one being the new steering wheel. Model Y is still the only vehicle in Tesla’s lineup that doesn’t have a stalkless steering wheel with force touch turn signals and a gear selector on the center display.
Considering all other Tesla vehicles went that way, this is expected to change with the Model Y refresh. Personally, I didn’t have any problem adapting to the new turn signals when driving the new Model 3 and Cybertruck, but I do admit that the gear selector is annoying.
I know many Tesla fans refused to get a Tesla vehicle with steering wheel stalks.
Electrek’s Take
Based on the information we have right now, I would expect the Model Y refresh to have a similar impact as the Model 3 refresh, but we could get a surprise.
Obviously, if there were significant improvements to the range, that would make a big difference, but I would only expect small incremental improvements at best.
A bigger surprise would be Tesla bringing something like the steer-by-wire and a 48-volt architecture from Cybertruck to Model Y. You have to try it to appreciate it, but the steer-by-wire on Cybertruck is super fun.
The design update looks good, but I thought the Model 3 redesign was even sharper, and it didn’t have much of an impact. I think new features or more efficiency/range would be the most significant difference makers.
What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.
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