DOE announced $1.9 billion for advanced transmission projects that it says will add 23 gigawatts of capacity in “record time.” Divide it out and you get about $83 of federal money per kilowatt. A new gas plant runs well over $2,000 a kilowatt by most recent estimates, assuming you can get a turbine. These aren’t the same product, since wire moves power and doesn’t make it, and the federal share isn’t the whole bill. I wouldn’t put the ratio on a t-shirt. The order of magnitude is what I keep staring at.

I only have the summary, but “advanced” in this context usually means getting more out of corridors that already exist: better conductors, sensors that let a line carry extra on a cool day. No new towers, no decade-long fight with landowners, which is presumably where the speed comes from. Earlier this week New York approved a 90-mile, $3.3 billion line aiming for 2030. An Ohio consumer advocate has waited three years for FERC to answer a single complaint about local transmission. “Record time” has a generous baseline here.

The setting is what makes it odd. A month ago this same administration declared a grid emergency to keep foreign equipment out, and BloombergNEF expects that to hurt battery and inverter supply chains. Now it’s paying for the one thing that makes every kind of generation deliverable. Twenty-three gigawatts of headroom doesn’t care what’s on the other end of the line. Maybe that’s why it’s easy to fund. Nobody has to have feelings about a conductor.

Same day, Exelon’s climate arm backed a grid-planning startup, citing tools that help a utility be “more efficient” about building infrastructure. A regulated utility earns its return on what it builds. I’m curious what “efficient” means when the cheapest option is the wire that’s already up.

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