What grid modernization means in practice

Posted: September 01, 2026

On a September day in 1882, Thomas Edison flipped a switch in lower Manhattan, bringing his new power station online and supplying electricity to a small stretch of the city. The system was modest by today's standards: six dynamos, 82 customers and around 400 lamps. But it was the beginning of something much bigger: the modern electric grid.

More than 140 years later, the grid has become one of the largest and most complex machines ever built. But, as transport, buildings and industry all become electrified, the infrastructure built to deliver power is aging and increasingly constrained.

Much of the network now needs to be upgraded, expanded or fundamentally rethought. Power grids started to be modernized from the early 2000s, but the International Energy Agency projects that global grids need to grow by around 25 million kilometers by 2035, a 30% increase, to meet climate and energy goals. At the same time, existing networks still need to be upgraded to accommodate new generation, rising demand and increasingly complex power flows.

More than just sustainability, electricity infrastructure is increasingly a matter of energy, economic and national security, too. Countries need resilient networks that can withstand extreme weather, geopolitical disruption and failures in critical infrastructure. As the energy sector becomes more digital and connected, they also need to protect their network from cyber threats.

Grid modernization, consequently, is about more than simply replacing old equipment with new. It involves a broad transformation of the physical and digital infrastructure that moves electricity—from new transmission corridors and underground cables to advanced conductors, high-voltage direct current, grid-enhancing technologies, sensors, automation and software.

How grid-enhancing technologies can make better use of transmission lines

Building more transmission lines will likely remain fundamental, especially to connect remote renewables with major demand centers. As Dan Gunderson, the vice president of transmission and distribution at Minnesota Power, told Reuters last year, any US region that fails to expand its network will see its power system “significantly constrained.”

But rights of way, permitting, construction times and public opposition make new infrastructure hard and slow to deliver. That conundrum is driving adoption of so-called grid-enhancing technologies, which aim to get more capacity, flexibility and efficiency out of the existing network. They include:

• Dynamic line ratings, which allow network operators to calculate transmission capacity based on real-time readings of local temperature, wind speed and solar irradiation, which all affect how much power the wires can carry.
• Advanced power-flow control devices that can divert electricity from congested lines to other circuits with spare capacity by altering the electrical impedance of individual lines.
• Topology optimization software for automatically rerouting the physical network to relieve bottlenecks, for example by opening or closing circuit breakers and switches—like a navigation app for the grid.

Technologies like these offer additional capacity faster than building a new transmission corridor. The IEA estimates that a combination of grid-enhancing technologies could unlock hundreds of gigawatts of additional capacity globally.

“We can’t wait ten to twelve years for new lines,” Theodore Paradise, chief policy and grid strategy officer at CTC Global, told an industry event last year.

Rewiring the power grid with advanced conductors

Paradise was actually talking about another technology. His company makes advanced conductors, which can replace the wires on existing transmission lines to similarly make them carry more power without requiring any new-build.

Most of the grid still uses wires made the same way as they were in the early 1900s, comprised of a steel core surrounded by strands of aluminum. But those lines sag when they heat up from heavy use or high temperatures—a growing issue during heat waves. Grid operators have to be careful not to overload these lines, or risk outages or fires.

Advanced conductors are much hardier, made of composites like carbon fiber wrapped in trapezoidal pieces of aluminum. They can cost-effectively double transmission capacity on existing routes, according to some studies.

As of 2023, over 90,000 miles of advanced conductors have been deployed globally. In Phoenix, a growing city with rising demand from data centers, local utility Salt River Project recently rewired an 8.5-mile stretch of its suburban grid to raise capacity by 80%, without replacing any of its 1970s-era transmission poles.

“You’re not acquiring a new right of way; you’re not building new towers,” Amol Phadke, a scientist at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of a study on advanced conductors. “So it can be done much faster.” 

Why grid operators are returning to direct current

At the same time, some developers have started going beyond upgrading individual components of the grid to changing the very architecture of the network—harking back all the way to Edison’s early efforts in the 19th century.

Back then, the inventor’s direct current (DC) power lines lost out against the alternating current (AC) backed by his rivals Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. Now, DC is making a comeback due to two key advantages. It loses less heat over long distances, which matters in a time when wind and solar are generated far from where their power is consumed.

High-voltage DC can also more easily connect grids that run at different frequencies. It can link offshore wind farms with onshore grids, connect countries across borders, or bridge the three asynchronous interconnections that divide the US transmission network.

Not far from Salt River Project’s reconductoring project in Phoenix, renewable energy developer Pattern Energy just commissioned a 550-mile HVDC transmission line to transport wind power from New Mexico all the way to Southern California. The project is the largest such line in the U.S., although other companies have already taken note. Dominion Energy wants to build a 185-mile line to deliver 3,000 MW of power into northern Virginia, the area with the highest data center capacity in the world.

Dominion’s transmission corridor also incorporates another modernization approach: the line will run entirely underground. Burying power lines, which is more common for urban distribution grids, is more complex and expensive but better protects the grid from physical threats. It also sidesteps public opposition to overhead infrastructure that can delay many projects.

“The cost of not having your grid underground just keeps getting higher and higher as our climate changes,” Ben Corwin, a VP at undergrounding start-up EarthGrid, previously told Our Industrial Life. “Storms that used to be 500-year, 100-year events now are sometimes annual, sometimes every ten years. Our infrastructure truly was not designed for that.”

The future of the electricity grid

Physical infrastructure is only half of the story, however. As the number of generators, distributed resources and flexible loads grow, operators also need much better visibility into what is happening across their network.

Utilities are moving from periodic planning and fixed assumptions to continuous measurement, prediction and optimization—using the same industrial data infrastructure that is transforming factories. Their toolkit now includes sensors and real-time monitoring, digital twins and network models, AI and advanced analytics, predictive maintenance and automated fault detection.

At the same time, the edge of the grid is blurring. The rise of rooftop solar, batteries, electric vehicles and heat pumps means traditional consumers are now both users and suppliers of power. Virtual power plants and demand response programs have turned households and businesses into grid assets.

Instead of meeting every increase in demand with more generation and more wires, operators can manage when and where electricity is consumed—but also need better forecasting, communications and market structures to do so.

“We are increasingly moving towards a much more data-driven energy system,” Michael Dodd, an energy networks expert at assurance and risk consultancy DNV, told Our Industrial Life. “The way that system operators, network owners—even generators and customers—are better able to generate that data, better understand it and make more assured operational decisions on the back of it, is absolutely essential.”

Threats to grid modernization

While the technologies to modernize the grid are increasingly available, the harder question may be whether the systems around them can move fast enough to deploy them.

One constraint is simply the physical supply chain. Transformers, for example, are highly customized, difficult to manufacture and expensive to transport. Last year, it took up to four years to secure large power transformers, with average lead times almost doubling since 2021. Copper is another bottleneck: the IEA projects a possible 25% supply shortfall by 2035 based on the current pipeline of mines, just as demand for the metal rises with grid expansion and electrification.

Then there are the institutional chokepoints. A new transmission project can take a decade or more to navigate planning, cost allocation, permitting and construction. Even technologies designed to make better use of existing infrastructure can struggle to gain traction. One report on advanced-conductor deployment identifies planning regimes, utility incentives and technical training among the barriers to adoption.

Perhaps the most fundamental challenge is innovation itself. In their book, Energy 2040: Aligning Innovation, Economics and Decarbonization, authors Deepak Divan and Suresh Sharma argue that energy innovation faces a persistent gap between technical discovery and commercial deployment, compounded by regulation, economics, organizational inertia and a tendency to work in silos. The problem is particularly acute for the grid, where new technologies must be integrated into infrastructure expected to operate reliably for decades.

Modernization, then, is not simply an engineering challenge, but also one of coordination: aligning utilities, regulators, manufacturers, investors and technology developers quickly enough to turn promising technologies into working infrastructure. Over the coming decades, the grid may need to move faster than ever—but so do the systems that govern how it is built.