ESIG’s Large Loads Task Force highlights the reasons current grid planning processes fail to keep pace with large loads and outlines key steps to evolve transmission planning so it can integrate large loads more quickly and cost effectively, recognizing major uncertainties.
The Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG) today released Transmission Planning with Large Loads: Current Practices and Recommendations, a new report from its Large Loads Task Force that traces the structural reasons why the growth in data centers, AI facilities, and other large loads is outpacing existing transmission planning processes, which were designed for slower and more dispersed demand growth. The report lays out what planners, utilities, and regulators can start doing now and over the longer term, as large load and associated generator interconnection requests continue to arrive faster than current planning processes can accommodate.
The report identifies three structural reasons current planning processes struggle to keep pace: (1) planning functions are siloed by jurisdiction, time horizon, and study method; (2) there is a fundamental timing mismatch between how fast large loads want to connect and how long transmission takes to plan and build; and (3) planners face a radically different level of demand uncertainty that current planning methods were not designed to handle.
“Every large load interconnection request that comes in today gets evaluated through a siloed planning process built for a world of slower, steadier load growth,” said James Okullo, ESIG Director System Planning. “This report identifies where the current planning process breaks down and lays out what needs to change to more quickly and cost-effectively address both near- and longer-term transmission needs.”
Large loads are seeking interconnection on timelines of months to a few years, far faster than the 5- to 10-year horizons of most transmission planning, permitting, and construction processes. Some facilities reach gigawatt scale and cluster geographically, meaning a single interconnection request can trigger regional-scale transmission needs. And because many proposed projects do not ultimately materialize, planners are left trying to develop long-lived, expensive infrastructure for a highly uncertain forecast of long-term needs.
“Most of the U.S. transmission investment is still driven by planning processes built to solve one transmission need at a time, rather than identify solutions that can better address the multiple near- and long-term needs we face to deliver the most value across the system,” said Johannes P. Pfeifenberger, a lead author of the report and a Principal of the Electricity Wholesale Markets & Planning team at The Brattle Group. “Large loads are exposing how costly that siloed approach can become when the problem in front of you is only one piece of a much bigger picture.”
The report distinguishes between actions planners can take now with immediate payoff (such as studies that make visible where the grid can serve new load, tools that quickly expand available grid capacity, and coordinating assumptions across planning functions) and structural shifts in the planning process, including moving from project-by-project upgrades toward proactive, scenario-based, multi-value planning with longer-term benefits.
“Planners don’t need to wait for perfect long-term forecasts to make better near-term decisions,” said Warren Lasher of Lasher Energy Consulting, a lead author on the report. “This report outlines practical steps of what can be done now, without new legislation or the need to redesign the entire planning process.”
The report points to existing experience—including MISO’s Long Range Transmission Planning, SPP’s proposed Consolidated Planning, Texas’s Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, and the Australian Integrated System Plan processes—as models for what better planning can look like under conditions of rapid but uncertain large load growth.
The new report, Transmission Planning with Large Loads: Current Practices and Recommendations, is one of 11 reports produced by ESIG’s Large Loads Task Force, which was established to assist the power industry in addressing the challenges introduced by the rapid proliferation of large electronic loads. This report is based on the work of the transmission planning project team of the ESIG Large Loads Task Force and was led by Johannes P. Pfeifenberger of The Brattle Group, Warren Lasher of Lasher Energy Consulting, and James Okullo of ESIG. Support was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy under Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.