Advanced Energy Perspectives

The United States electric grid is undergoing a transformation and significant changes need to occur for Americans to fully realize the benefits of these improvements. The key is the transmission system. As the federal agency charged with regulating interstate transmission of electricity, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is uniquely positioned to create new rules that better ensure Americans can achieve equitable, affordable access to energy, secure our grid’s future reliability, and accelerate the transition to clean generation and advanced grid technologies. 

This blog post is an excerpt from the Advanced Energy Now 2023 Market Report, prepared for Advanced Energy United by  Guidehouse  Insights. This post is the fifth in a series of excerpts from the report. 

Worldwide, Advanced Electricity Delivery and Management (ED&M) products and services, which includes a subset of the overall ED&M market, achieved an 11% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the period 2017 to 2022; in the U.S., the CAGR was 13% over that same period.  

The year 2022 was the biggest for the segment since we started tracking it in 2011, recording 15% annual growth globally and 16% in the U.S. While global growth was slightly slower in 2021, at 14%, ED&M grew significantly in the U.S. (+41%) due to the proliferation of large-scale energy storage. The impact of energy storage technologies on total market growth has been quite significant over the past two years. For example, when excluding the Energy Storage subsegment, ED&M annual market growth in 2021 falls from 14% to 9% globally, and from 41% to 19% in the U.S. 

There is much discussion in the press about the high cost of rebuilding our transmission infrastructure to facilitate our clean energy future. There is much less discussion about the costs we are already paying associated with not moving quickly to rebuild our aging grid. Transmission is critical infrastructure, powering our 21st digital economy and keeping us all safe and protecting us when weather is extreme. Much of the U.S. transmission grid is long past its expected useful life.  

Across the country, clean energy developers are facing increasingly long and costly waits to connect their projects to the grid. The core problem they face is the lack of grid infrastructure to get clean electricity from where it’s made to where it is used.  

This past weekend, President Biden signed a bill to raise the national debt ceiling that also included modest improvements in the permitting process for building clean energy projects. As part of the negotiation process, Congressional leaders considered policy changes to speed up the buildout of large-scale electric grid transmission, such as expanding transmission capacity between regions. Ultimately, and unfortunately, those reforms were not included in the bill.