In Short
Expanding the transmission can save customers billions of dollars, improve reliability, and strengthen national security. Across every scenario studied, transmission delivers more benefits than costs, returning up to $1.89 in system-wide benefits for every dollar invested and generating as much as $15.3 billion in system-wide benefits by 2050.
The Analysis
Converge Strategies, Electricity Customer Alliance, and National Grid developed key economic and national security insights while partnering with S&P Global Energy for quantitative analysis across four regions of the Eastern Interconnection: The Northeast, PJM, SERC, and SPP/MISO South, where defense infrastructure and datacenter growth increasingly overlap. Click to explore, “Powering Growth and Affordability: The Role of Transmission in Economic and National Security,” the full report, region-specific economic insights, and the national security stakes.
What’s Clear
Targeted, interregional transmission investment is a net economic win that strengthens grid reliability and national security. Transmission expansion delivers value beyond dollars by lowering retail electricity rates and strengthening energy security for military installations, defense communities, and the defense industrial base.
National Security Stakes
Click to explore the one-page summary of the critical role of transmission infrastructure to national defense in each region analyzed by the study.
The grid is the cornerstone of national defense. Almost every US military installation runs on the commercial grid, and defense communities depend on it to sustain readiness and quality of life, making transmission infrastructure a direct national security priority.
Deterrence requires a resilient grid. National defense priorities demand transmission infrastructure hardened against extreme weather, physical attack, and cyber intrusion, since a grid that can absorb shocks denies adversaries a decisive first-strike advantage.
Enhancing grid reliability is critical to national defense. Transmission expansion supports three areas of defense activity that are linked to each other: installations and missions, the communities that support military infrastructure, and the network of companies and private industry that make up each region’s “defense industrial base.”