The Go-To

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is “anxious to see action” on repealing gas power plant emissions rules. “We all understand that natural gas is the go-to for new generation in this country,” their CEO said this week, which is the kind of sentence that sounds like a fact until you check it against what’s actually going up. Another report out the same day: solar plus batteries dominated US grid additions in the first half of this year. Not gas. Solar and batteries, again, the way they have for a while now. The lobbying and the concrete are pointing in different directions, and only one of them is load-bearing.

Meanwhile FERC quietly approved something called “topology optimization” for SPP — basically letting the grid operator reroute power through lines that are already there, in real time, instead of waiting on new construction. MISO’s version of the same idea has saved almost $100 million this year. No turbines, no easements, no decade-long queue. Just admitting the network has been running with one hand tied behind its back because the planning software never bothered to ask which lines were actually free.

I keep bumping into this same shape lately — dynamic line rating, RAS schemes, now this — utilities discovering that a meaningful chunk of the capacity crisis was never a hardware problem. It was an imagination problem, dressed up as an infrastructure one. Nobody testifies to Congress about topology optimization. It just quietly works.