The biggest threat to American global competitiveness, and it does not matter if your priorities are climate change, affordability, the AI race, national security or all of the above, is our country’s complete inability to build and upgrade transmission at any meaningful scale.
I agree that this is a huge problem. We are rapidly building new electrical generation capacity in the US, mainly in the form of utility-scale solar arrays. But that does no good if the power can't get to users. We have dozens of solar projects that are built but producing no power because they cannot get hooked to the grid, and they can't get hooked to the grid because the utilities are far behind in making the necessary adjustments. This is why some major power users, like Microsoft, are talking about building their own nuclear reactors.
Building long-distance power lines is just hard. People hate having them built near their houses, and for good reason: they dramatically depress property values. There is also some evidence that they can contribute to cancer; I think this evidence is bad, but it is better than a lot of other medical evidence many people believe in, e.g. harm from vaccines.
I had a small part in the last major US effort to upgrade our transmission network, the new Appalachian backbone that was necessary to stablilize the east coast grid, built in roughly 1995-2015. That took a lot of political capital, including a handshake between Bill Clinton and New Gingrich, but is showed that we can do it if we put our minds to it. Right now, though, politicians seem to be distracted by other issues.
The technology exists now to bury long-distance power lines, but it is expensive and so far as I know, none have yet been built in the US. But we may have to go that route to reach the grid we need.
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