While Washington is limiting options, these solutions can help meet rising electricity demand now
To overcome near-term load growth and reliability challenges while maintaining affordability and individual state goals, the U.S. must maximize the deployment of every viable near-term solution right now. While long-term strategies, such as commercializing clean firm technologies,1 are necessary to manage long-term reliable and affordable system growth risks, most are out of reach over the next several years of rapid load growth. Despite this, there remains a host of underutilized but readily available electricity generation, storage, demand flexibility, and transmission solutions that can be brought online quickly and affordably while maintaining community and environmental protections.
To highlight these opportunities, Clean Air Task Force (CATF) commissioned a new report from The Brattle Group, featuring quantitative case studies that show how to make better use of the existing electricity system. These actions are accompanied by the identification of the stakeholders responsible for implementation. The report also details how to improve long-term planning to yield lasting positive impacts on future expansion and cost reduction relative to the status quo.
Many existing solutions remain underutilized
Even before this recent surge in load growth, long-term system challenges were threatening affordability, reliability, and resiliency. Nearly 70 percent of transmission lines are over 25 years old and approaching the end of their useful life.2 Climate change risks increasingly strain power system resiliency and reliability.3 Existing technologies that can increase system flexibility – like grid-enhancing technologies – remain under-deployed. New technologies that can reduce power system vulnerability to extreme weather and global supply chain shocks or unlock new local natural resources – like next generation geothermal – remain underfunded.
Many available technologies are mature, cost-effective, and clean. Renewables like wind and solar are now competitive new power sources in many regions, as reflected by the private market: 95% of generation capacity sitting in interconnection queues is solar, wind, and battery storage.4,5 Capping renewable growth at today’s levels would increase costs relative to allowing renewables to be deployed freely.6
New transmission development, independent from the expanding use of renewable resources, also holds significant potential for cost reductions and reliability. This includes under-deployed grid-enhancing technologies, alternative transmission technologies, and more. Flexibility solutions, like demand-response programs, can support grid resilience by smoothing out electricity demand and related energy price spikes, and they enable new loads to connect while minimizing the need for new infrastructure.7
However, the deployment of these readily available solutions is stymied by a variety of regulatory, policy, and process challenges. Addressing these challenges requires a range of short- and long-term reform efforts, including changes to electricity market design, and improvements to transmission planning, generator interconnection, and procurement processes across the country.
Actions exist that have near-term implications
The Brattle Group study identifies four critical categories of actions (Table 1):
- Maximizing existing system value;
- Accelerating cost-effective interconnection of new loads;
- Strengthening planning and procurement for proactive infrastructure investment; and
- Implementing targeted affordability protections for vulnerable customers while mitigating long-term cost exposure.
These solutions present actionable steps that system operators, utilities, regulators, and customers can implement immediately to address future grid demands while maintaining affordability, supporting economic development, and advancing environmental objectives. Table 1 provides a summary of solutions and stakeholder actions as presented in The Brattle Group paper.
Table 1: Stakeholder action matrix
Time to act on available solutions
Much of today’s energy policy conversation centers on the federal government and the direction of the new U.S. administration. While it is important to preserve key incentives that support clean energy, local economic growth, and technology commercialization, many powerful levers for progress lie at the state, regional, and local levels, as shown in Table 1.
So, while Washington seems bent on undermining the deployment of the clean energy resources needed to meet projected load growth, the rest of the country can act. States control key aspects of transmission planning, utility procurement, and project siting. Regional grid operators set market rules that shape which resources are built and when. Local governments influence permitting timelines and community acceptance.
The Brattle Group’s report lays out several categories of action that regulators, utilities, grid operators, and policymakers can work on right now to tackle near-term issues and deploy cost-effective resources, while laying critical groundwork for an integrated, low-cost, and resilient energy system. Let us all identify solutions for which we are responsible and reform the policies necessary to deploy them.
1 Clean firm technologies refer to low-emission technologies that can generate electricity as necessary by the system, and are not dependent on weather. Examples include nuclear fission, fusion, geothermal, and gas with high levels of carbon capture and upstream methane emission mitigation.
2 U.S. Department of Energy, Grid Deployment Office. “What Does It Take to Modernize the U.S. Electric Grid.” DOE, 2025, www.energy.gov/gdo/articles/what-does-it-take-modernize-us-electric-grid.
3 National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Grid-Forming Inverters for Grid Modernization (FY23, NREL/TP84152). North American Electric Reliability Corporation. LongTerm Reliability Assessment 2024. NERC, 2024, www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/ra/Reliability%20Assessments%20DL/NERC_Long%20Term%20Reliability%20Assessment_2024.pdf.
4 Queued Up: 2024 Edition, Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection as of the End of 2023. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, April 2024, https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/Queued%20Up%202024%20Edition_R2.pdf.
5 For example, in the EIA’s “no IRA” case (with no Inflation Reduction Act incentives), U.S. wind and solar still rise from 15% of generation in 2022 to 39% by 2050 simply due to market forces. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Annual Energy Outlook 2023: Issues in Focus – Inflation Reduction Act Cases. EIA, 2023, https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/IIF_IRA/pdf/IRA_IIF.pdf.
6 “NREL Finds Keeping Renewables at Today’s Levels or Limiting Their Growth Results in Higher U.S. Power System Costs.” National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 19 March 2021, https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2021/nrel-finds-keeping-renewables-at-todays-levels-or-limiting-their-growth-results-in-higher-us-power-system-costs.html.
7 “Rethinking Load Growth.” Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Duke University, 2023, https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/publications/rethinking-load-growth.
