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and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory are working on executing that work, but the results of that study will not be published for some time, a NREL researcher told CNBC.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.
After a sluggish stretch, US wind is heading into a pivotal moment, with a near-term rebound colliding with rising power demand, tariffs, and stubborn permitting bottlenecks.
US wind power: the next five years
The US is expected to add more than 7 gigawatts (GW) of new wind capacity in 2025, a 36% increase from this year, according to the latest US Wind Energy Monitor report from Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association (ACP).
That matters now because the US power grid is under mounting pressure, just as new generation has become harder to build. Electricity demand is rising for the first time in years, mainly driven by data centers and other large loads, while wind developers are navigating higher turbine costs, tariff uncertainty, and permitting delays. How quickly projects can move from the pipeline to completion over the next few years will shape whether wind can help keep the lights on and power prices in check.
Over the longer term, the outlook is steady but increasingly back‑loaded. The report still sees 46 GW of new wind capacity coming online between 2025 and 2029. What has changed is timing. More projects are now expected to reach completion in the middle of the decade, with 2026 and 2027 shaping up to be especially busy years at 10.7 GW and 12.7 GW, respectively, as projects move through the development pipeline.
That shift helps explain why installations lagged earlier this year. Wind additions in Q3 came in at 932 megawatts (MW), about 23% below forecasts. But activity is picking up fast. Developers have about 3.8 GW queued for Q4 2025 alone, which would account for 52% of the year’s total expected capacity. That kind of late-year rush is typical for wind projects, which tend to reach completion toward the end of the calendar year.
There are also signs of life on the manufacturing side. US turbine order intake rebounded in Q3 to pre–Trump’s big bill act levels, with more than 2 GW of firm commitments, the strongest quarter in the past nine months, and a 79% jump from the previous quarter. But you wouldn’t know it, because turbine makers are increasingly keeping project details close to their chests, and much of the qualifying “start-of-construction” activity is happening off-site through component manufacturing.
Looking further out, the report flags a noticeable slowdown toward the end of the decade. Capacity additions in 2029 are expected to drop sharply following project cancellations and inactive designations, largely due to permitting challenges and broader development constraints.
Power demand takes off
At the same time, the need for new power is growing fast.
After a decade of mostly flat electricity demand, US power demand is now expected to grow by around 3% per year through 2029, compared to just 0.7% over the previous decade. Data centers alone are expected to drive about 59 GW of the roughly 90 GW increase in peak demand. That kind of round-the-clock load makes more wind power a necessity.
“The US power market is facing mounting strain after a decade of flat demand, with utilities committing to 160 GW of large-load additions,” said Leila Garcia da Fonseca, Wood Mackenzie’s director of research. “This represents a significant opportunity for wind energy, which benefits from strengthened economic fundamentals and a compelling business case driven by its competitively low LCOE.”
But she also warned that higher turbine costs and policy uncertainty could slow down progress in the middle of the decade.
Onshore wind: Western states lead
Onshore wind continues to do the heavy lifting. The five-year onshore outlook remains unchanged at 39.8 GW of new capacity, and the 2025–2027 pipeline already has turbine orders in place for every project. More than 60% of that three-year capacity has either been commissioned or is already under construction.
Western states are leading the charge. Wyoming, New Mexico, and neighboring states are expected to account for about 34% of onshore activity over that period. Big projects are driving the numbers, including Pattern Energy’s 3.5 GW SunZia project in New Mexico, which is set to make the company the top wind installer in 2026, and Invenergy’s 998 MW Towner Energy Center in Colorado, the single largest project expected to come online in 2027.
Wind is also spreading into new territory. Arkansas recently brought its first utility-scale onshore wind farm online with Cordelio’s Crossover Wind (pictured).
Repowering older wind farms remains another bright spot. Wood Mackenzie expects 18 repowering projects to add about 2.5 GW of capacity over the next three years.
Offshore wind: progress, but pressure
Offshore wind is a different story. Wood Mackenzie expects offshore installations to slow in Q4 2025 due to harsh winter weather, pushing some capacity into 2026. Still, projects already under construction are making progress. Vineyard Wind connected 15 turbines in Q3 and delivered 200 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity over the first nine months of the year.
“US offshore wind shows diverging momentum,” Garcia da Fonseca said. “Projects under construction with commercial operation dates in 2026 continue to hit key milestones, but post-2027 developments face potential delays amid constrained wind turbine installation vessel capacity, driving delays and contract terminations.”
The offshore sector is also under growing financial strain – and let’s not forget political attack from the Trump administration – with delays and contract terminations weighing on late-decade projects.
Tariffs are making turbines more expensive
Tariffs remain one of the biggest wild cards for the US wind industry. Wood Mackenzie expects tariffs to push turbine costs higher in 2026 before easing in later years. Overall, US onshore wind capital spending is projected to rise by about 5% through 2029.
“US wind turbine pricing is experiencing unprecedented uncertainty as conflicting market and regulatory forces interact,” said Garcia da Fonseca. While domestic manufacturing capacity could eventually bring prices down, tariffs on raw materials and key components are expected to keep costs elevated in the near term.
Read more: Federal judge rules Trump’s offshore wind ban illegal
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After Lucid Group’s (LCID) stock price reached a new all-time low this week, the company’s communication boss is out to set the record straight.
Lucid stock hits a new low as investors wait
Lucid is facing new headwinds in the US at a critical time as the EV maker looks to enter its next growth phase. It’s ramping up output of its first electric SUV, the Gravity, and is set to launch its midsize platform in late 2026.
Like all automakers, the company is facing new headwinds in the US under the Trump administration, but that isn’t stopping Lucid from continuing on its mission of “changing the world through innovation and efficiency.”
Lucid’s head of communications, Nick Twork, reassured investors on Thursday that while others are pulling back, the company is still plowing ahead.
“We know it’s been a challenging period for our long-term holders,” Twork said, adding, “We are focused on execution and being transparent.” Twork reaffirmed investors that Lucid has “a strong liquidity runway,” including a $2 billion PIF credit facility, and another $2 billion in refinanced convertible notes that now mature in 2030/31.
$LCID investors: we know it’s been a challenging period for our long-term holders. We are focused on execution and being transparent. As our CFO Taoufiq has said, we have a strong liquidity runway, including an undrawn $2B PIF credit facility, and we refinanced $2B of converts… pic.twitter.com/4gvzFqmpLj
— Nick Twork (@ntwork) December 18, 2025
While other automakers are scaling back EV plans, including Ford most recently, “we’re building through it and ramping,” Lucid’s communications boss said.
After a magnet shortage and other supply chain constraints hampered Gravity production early on, Lucid now expects the electric SUV to make up the majority of production and deliveries in the fourth quarter.
Speaking at the 53rd Annual Nasdaq Investor Conference last week, Lucid’s interim CEO, Marc Winterhoff, said the company “is on track” to hit its guidance of producing 18,000 vehicles this year. That’s at the lower end of its initial 20,000 to 18,000 target, but Winterhoff said output is picking up and Lucid now has “weeks where we are producing 1,000 vehicles” in a single week.”
Hitting that 18,000 target won’t be easy. Through the third quarter, Lucid produced 9,966 EVs, meaning it will need to build over 8,000 more in Q4. That’s more than double the 3,891 it made in the third quarter.
Lucid had about $4.2 billion in liquidity at the end of Q3, but after agreeing with PIF to increase the delayed draw term loan credit facility (DDTL), the company said total liquidity would have been around $5.5 billion.
The capital is enough to fund it through the first half of 2027, Lucid said. Later next year, Lucid will begin production of its midsize platform, which will underpin at least three new vehicles priced around $50,000.
Lucid’s first midsize model will be an electric crossover SUV, followed by a more rugged version inspired by the Gravity X concept. The third is rumoured to be a midsize sedan that will compete with the Tesla Model 3.
During a fireside chat at the UBS Global Industrials and Transportation Conference earlier this month, Lucid’s CFO, Taoufiq Boussaid, said the midsize EVs will be positioned in “the heart of the market,” starting at around $50,000.
While Rivian (RIVN) and Tesla (TSLA) shares are trading up by over 50% and 27%, respectively, since the beginning of 2025, Lucid’s stock price has fallen by over 60%. Earlier this week, Lucid’s stock touched an all-time low of $11.09 per share.
Twork said Lucid will share more information about its growth plans during its Capital Market Day in the first quarter.
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Like a 90s “gifted” kid that was supposed to be a lot of things, the electric Jeep Wagoneer S was supposed to be sporty, luxurious, and appeal to a whole new Jeep buyer. Despite being a decent vehicle, it never really found its place — but now that Jeep is offering nearly $17,000 off select models, it might be time to give the go-fast Wagoneer S a second look.
Whether we’re talking about Mercedes-Benz, Cerberus, Fiat, or even Enzo Ferrari, there have been no shortage of corporate outsiders have labeled Jeep as a potentially premium brand that could, “if managed properly,” command luxury-level prices all over the globe. That hasn’t happened, and Stellantis is just the latest in a long line of companies to sink massive capital into the brand only to realize that people will not, in fact, spend Mercedes money on a Jeep.
“Stellantis bet big on electric versions of iconic American brands like Jeep and Dodge, but consumers aren’t buying the premise,” wrote CDG’s Marcus Amick, back in June. “(Stellantis’ dealer body) is now stuck with expensive EVs that need huge discounts to move, eating into already thin margins while competitors focus on [more] profitable gas-powered vehicles.”
To get its prices back in line with the market’s expectations, Jeep is slashing prices with lots of cash on the hood. That includes a hefty $15,250 incentive on select Wagoneer S trims listed as a “2025 National EV Credit Select Inventory Retail Bonus Cash” offer by Greenville Chrysler in Greenville, Texas — which seems like it would be stackable with $1,500 in National Stellantis Loyalty Retail Bonus Cash as well, for a total of $16,750 in incentives before any additional dealer discounts come into play.
All of which is to say: if you’ve found yourself drawn to the Jeep Wagoneer S, but couldn’t quite stomach the $70,000+ window stickers, you might want to check in with your local Jeep dealer and see how you feel about it at a JCPenneys-like 30% off!
Original content from Electrek.
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