A Policy Forum paper published in Science on November 12 gives the transmission bottleneck a number, and the number is blunt. The continental United States has built only about 500 miles of high-voltage transmission per year over the last half-decade, according to Madeline Yozwiak and M. Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University and David G. Victor of the University of California San Diego. That is roughly 10 percent of the 5,000 miles a year studies say will be needed to triple the interregional grid by 2050. The authors’ verdict: the United States faces one of the most severe power transmission bottlenecks in the world — and the central problem is not the wires.
The paper, titled “Fixing the power transmission crisis,” lands in a debate this desk has followed all autumn: the country knows what the grid needs, the studies agree on the scale, and the build rate keeps falling anyway. Its contribution: framing that failure precisely — as an institutional and jurisdictional problem — and a three-point plan, from what can be done now without new legislation to a proposal for a body that could produce it.
The number, unpacked
The 500-mile figure comes from the annual series maintained by Grid Strategies and Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, built from FERC’s monthly infrastructure reports. In 2013, the United States completed nearly 4,000 miles of high-voltage transmission in a single year, driven by the Texas CREZ build-out and the Midwest’s multi-value projects. By 2024, the initially reported figure was 322 miles of new 345-kilovolt-and-above lines — the third-slowest year in fifteen — though FERC later revised the total upward to 888 miles. Averaged across the last half-decade, the pace is about 500 miles a year. The 5,000-mile benchmark comes from the Department of Energy’s 2024 National Transmission Planning Study, whose most conservative scenario implies roughly 5,000 miles of high-capacity transmission per year within regions, plus more between them.
The striking feature of the series is that the money did not dry up — the miles did. Annual transmission spending rose from around $10 billion in 2010 to more than $20 billion a year since 2013. But that spending has gone overwhelmingly to local reliability upgrades and replacement of aging equipment: reconductoring, substation rebuilds, new transformers. The high-voltage backbone — the long-distance, interregional lines that move power between regions — is the part that stopped being built. At the current pace, the country would need a century to build what the studies say is needed by 2050.
What tripling the interregional grid actually means
“Tripling the interregional grid” sounds abstract. Interregional transfer capability is the amount of power that can move between large regions — the Midwest and the Southeast, say, or Texas and its neighbors. It is the grid’s shared insurance: neighboring regions rarely peak at the same time, so a region in stress can lean on a neighbor that is not. During extreme events, the regions that fared best were often the ones that could import power from somewhere the weather was not simultaneously failing.
The economic case is as strong as the reliability case. Congestion costs — the premium consumers pay because cheap power cannot reach them — run into the billions of dollars annually across U.S. markets. Modeling released this month by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and Greenline Insights puts the savings from interconnection queue reform and expanded interregional transmission at roughly $125 billion in cumulative grid costs from 2026 to 2040 — about $7 billion in 2035 alone, net of $1.9 billion in added transmission investment. The interconnection queue tells the same story from the other side: more than 2,000 gigawatts of generation and storage were seeking grid connections at the end of 2025, much of it waiting on upgrades the transmission system cannot deliver. The evidence has been settled for years, yet the build rate has fallen — because the benefits are diffuse, spread across many states, while the costs and the vetoes are concentrated.
An institutional failure, not an engineering one
“The fundamental challenge isn’t technical, it’s jurisdictional,” the authors write. “Authority is divided among federal, state and private entities, each with distinct priorities. When every stakeholder possesses the power to say no, even high-value projects that benefit the entire nation struggle to move forward.” As this desk’s foundational explainer documented, a major interstate line needs approval from every state it crosses, each with its own proceeding, and a single denial can kill the project. The veto-point problem is the system working as designed — designed, that is, for a grid of local utilities serving local load, not a continental network.
The paper adds a sharper edge: incumbent utilities often face economic incentives to limit the regional connections that could undercut their local market power. A line that lets cheap power flow into a utility’s service territory is good for that territory’s consumers and bad for the utility’s generation assets — and the planning processes that would identify such lines are, in practice, run by the same utilities. FERC’s Order 1920 requires long-term regional planning over 20-year horizons, but a rule can require planners to identify a beneficial line; it cannot make states approve it or beneficiaries agree to pay for it — and the beneficiary-pays fight underneath is why planning keeps producing local upgrades while the large regional lines die in negotiation.
The plan, first: use the authority that already exists
The first recommendation is to maximize existing FERC and DOE authorities and modern technologies — what can be done now, under current law. On the authority side, DOE designating National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors and FERC exercising its backstop siting power inside them. On the technology side, it means squeezing more capacity from existing corridors: reconductoring with advanced conductors, converting AC lines to DC to roughly triple their capacity, and deploying voltage-sourced converter HVDC — including buried cables along existing highway and railroad rights-of-way, which sidestep the siting fights new overhead corridors invite.
The technology half is the strongest and least controversial part of the paper: reconductoring and grid-enhancing technologies deliver capacity in years, not decades, without new rights-of-way. The authority half is more fragile, and the paper does not quite say so. FERC’s backstop siting power reaches only inside corridors DOE has designated — and on August 12, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright announced that DOE will designate none of the three corridors that had reached the final phase of review — leaving that authority with nowhere to be exercised. A fair ask — administrations change — but not a plan that works on its own in 2026.
The plan, second: learn from countries that build
The second recommendation is to learn from international precedents. The United States lags its peers in deploying long-distance HVDC and in cross-border planning: operators in Europe, assisted by the Trans-European Networks for Energy, have navigated political veto points and deployed underground HVDC at scale; Britain and Australia have used power electronics and HVDC to stabilize grids as renewable shares rose; China and India rely on HVDC lines to manage renewable energy over continental distances. The paper proposes a cross-national forum, led by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and assisted by the Regulatory Assistance Project, DOE, and the Electric Power Research Institute, to adapt proven regulatory and technological strategies to the American system. It is the quietest of the three recommendations — it needs no legislation and no change of administration. But a forum produces knowledge, not permits, and the veto problem is not a knowledge problem. It is solved by changing who holds the veto, which is a legislative question.
The plan, third: a commission to force the trade-offs
That brings the paper to its third and most ambitious recommendation: a Presidential-Congressional Transmission Commission, established jointly by Congress and the White House and modeled on successful bipartisan task forces, that would put all the key players in one room to hammer out the trade-offs. Its four focuses: drafting federal and state laws to cut red tape and speed grid building, in the spirit of the current “abundance” agenda; determining whether FERC should be granted broader authority to approve major power-line corridors; working with groups like NARUC to identify promising reforms; and identifying market incentives to guide private investment — including bonus incentives to reward first-mover developers and host communities.
The commission idea deserves to be taken seriously because it is the only one of the three that matches the scale of the diagnosis. If the problem is that authority is fragmented across dozens of jurisdictions, each optimizing for its own constituents, then the solution has to be a forum where those constituents negotiate a settlement — and a commission with a presidential and congressional mandate is the only vehicle the paper offers that could plausibly produce one. The model is the base-closure commission, which worked because Congress bound itself in advance to vote on the package. Transmission has the same structure: every line has a district that would rather not host it. A transmission commission that merely recommends legislation is a study group with better stationery. The paper does not specify whether its recommendations would carry binding force, and in a Congress that has not passed major transmission legislation in two decades, recommendations alone have a poor track record.
Where the Senate’s permitting bill fits
The paper lands while the Senate is already debating the closest thing to a transmission package in years. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, S. 5653, cleared its first two procedural votes this week — 73–25 on November 9 to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to the vehicle bill, H.R. 2347, and 62–21 on November 10 to proceed — and on November 11 Majority Leader Thune filed cloture on the sponsors’ substitute amendment and on the bill itself. This desk covered the bill’s transmission title in detail on November 12. The point of contact with the Science paper is a single tension, and it matters.
BAAJA would replace the corridor system with a nationwide federal backstop: FERC could permit a qualifying interstate line over a state’s objection almost anywhere except the ERCOT area of Texas, and DOE’s corridor-designation authority would be repealed. The bill would thus make the paper’s first recommendation — use the existing corridor authority — moot by abolishing the corridor system entirely. The paper assumes the existing framework can be made to work; the bill assumes it cannot. Which prevails depends on whether BAAJA survives its second cloture vote, floor debate, and a House that has not yet engaged — before the current Congress ends on January 3, 2027. There is also a narrower friction: the manager’s amendment that bought the bill its votes gives states a full year in the siting process before a developer can seek the federal backstop — a year in which, the paper’s authors would presumably say, a line can be quietly killed. The bill’s sponsors would call it the price of a coalition. Both are right, which is why the bill is a negotiation and the paper is a diagnosis.
What the paper leaves open
The honest assessment is that the diagnosis is stronger than the prescriptions. The first plank depends on an administration that has declined to use the authority it invokes. The second produces knowledge, not permits. The third produces a commission whose recommendations Congress is free to ignore. None of the three builds a single mile of transmission. What they do is name the mechanism of failure with unusual precision and refuse the fiction that the problem is engineering, money, or public opposition in the abstract. The money is being spent — more than $20 billion a year. The engineering exists. The opposition is specific, institutional, and located in the veto points the paper maps.
Two practical constraints go unaddressed. The first is physical: even a permitted line cannot be built faster than large power transformers can be manufactured — lead times now stretch past two years — or faster than specialized lineworkers can be mobilized, with much of the experienced workforce nearing retirement. The second is the pace arithmetic: tripling the interregional grid by 2050 requires building 5,000 miles a year and sustaining that rate for a quarter-century. The 2013 peak of nearly 4,000 miles shows the country can build at scale; it also shows that a single-year peak is not a sustained program.
What to watch
Three things will tell us whether this paper is a marker or a moment. First, the Senate: whether BAAJA clears its second cloture vote will show whether the corridor system is replaced or the paper’s first plank remains the only available strategy. Second, the Department of Energy: any reconsideration of the August 12 decision not to designate corridors would be the first sign the existing authorities might actually be used. Third, the commission idea itself: whether any member of Congress picks it up as legislation, or whether it joins the long shelf of task forces whose reports outlived their political moment. The warning to keep: muddling through will fail, and the cost is measured in congestion charges on consumer bills, in generation that cannot connect, and in reliability margins that thin every year the build rate stays at 500 miles.