Grid Strategies LLC

I've covered the power sector since 2006, and I currently report for Utility Dive.

In this episode of the podcast, my guest is once again the great Gretchen Kershaw, vice president of strategy and chief operating officer for power sector consultant Grid Strategies.

Gretchen's gonna describe the key elements of the just-announced bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which has taken four years to develop and which could change the landscape of the US power system if it gets through the Senate, the House, the President, and lives down its very unfortunate acronym, BAAJA, which I guess people will s- call Baja.

Gretchen joined Grid Strategies in February of 2025 after serving as senior advisor on transmission in the Biden's DOE's Grid Deployment Office.

Before that, Gretchen was FERC legal advisor to Chair Richard Glick, and then managing attorney and senior legal advisor to the commission's general counsel.

So Gretchen, here's what we have.

It is extremely strong for transmission.

The thing that I am really thrilled about is how comprehensive it is.

I have Rob Gramlich with me.

He's the founder and president of Grid Strategies.

That's a Washington power sector consulting firm, and he has experience with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and working with the operator PJM, if I'm not mistaken.

That's one of the biggest grid operators in the country and has worked as an economic advisor for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's chairman, Pat Wood.

I really enjoy that.

We get, uh- You know, we get asked by policymakers for expert input.

We're not lobbyists, like we're not proactively at Grid Strategies going up and saying, "Here's a bill.

Please sign your name and pass this bill."

Keep in mind that all the other cloud computing stuff is also growing at a pretty rapid pace still.

Again, projections are all over the place, but one that Grid Strategies put together by surveying all the utility load forecasts and compiling those and kind of doing some of their own discounting of probabilities came up with somewhere between 150 and 165 gigawatts of peak demand growth between now and 2030.

160 gigawatts is all of the PJM market, which is the largest interconnection in the U.S. by volume.

Or all of Kaiso and ERCOT, California and Texas markets, put together.

So looking five years out, that's about 15 New York City's worth of power.

My guest today is Rob Gramlack, founder and president of Grid Strategies.

His work focuses on the electric grid, power markets, and the infrastructure needed to meet France's growing energy demand.

In this conversation, we talk about why electricity may become one of the biggest bottlenecks for AI, how the US grid works, why grid infrastructure takes so long to build, and who should pay for them grids.

How do you figure out who consumed how much power and what cost do they cause and how do you? assign those costs because it's split between federal jurisdiction and state jurisdiction.

And I won't bore you with the details.

That's something that we at Grid Strategies and other experts like us try to help figure out and help advise states and utilities on how to do that.

Okay, yeah.

If you can add transmission, whether it's new build or reconductoring, whatever it is, and move power, uh, around to where it's needed, you can use the cheapest power, and that can save billions of dollars really quickly.

There's been some great studies out there, Grid Strategies, a group did a, a study out there, and for every dollar invested, it's $5 to $6 of savings, uh, that you reap from that on transmission.

So the payback on transmission investment of all kinds is really significant.

Now, when you think about that, and to some of the things J.D. was talking about in terms of time, if that's true, and it is, um, then you wanna get there as fast as you can, one, right? So if it's gonna take 10 or 15 years to recognize that savings, well, that's not as good as 24 months from now.