The Download: supercharging the power grid, and a new Chinese AI agent

—Brian Deese is an innovation fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as director of the White House National Economic Council from 2021 to 2023. Rob Gramlich is founder and president of Grid Strategies and was economic advisor to the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during the George W. Bush administration. US electricity consumption is rising faster than it has in decades. Accommodating that growth will require building wind turbines, solar farms, and other power plants faster than we ever have before—and expanding the network of wires needed to connect those facilities to the grid. But one major problem is that it’s expensive and slow to secure permits for new transmission lines and build them across the country. Fortunately, there are some shortcuts that could expand the capacity of the existing system without requiring completely new infrastructure: a suite of hardware and software tools known as advanced transmission technologies (ATTs ... Read full article.