Highlights from the Transmission and Distribution Live 2025 Conference

If you have been following The Fusion Report for a while, you know that in addition to covering specific fusion topics, we also cover adjacent spaces that support the commercialization of fusion. One of these is the transmission and distribution (“T&D”) space, which is concerned about the movement of electric power within and between metro areas. Last week, Phoenix hosted the Transmission and Distribution World Live show. While not a huge show in the sense of a CES or other blockbuster shows, T&D Live 2025 is focused on a space where (as we have reported before) the US is increasingly facing an aging power infrastructure. I will give a quick synopsis of some of these sessions here.

Data Centers and the Grid: Debunking Myths, Exploring Real Impacts

An area of some note (if not controversy today) is the role that the development of large data centers have on retail electrical prices and electrical availability and reliability. As we have reported before, data centers are one of the fastest growing consumers of electricity on the planet, with the US and China leading the trend.

The focus of this discussion panel at T&D World Live 2025, which featured Josh Franklin from Amazon Web Services (AWS; the largest data center company in the US). Josh’s position is to make sure that the AWS data centers in the central US have enough power and water to meet their needs. One area that Josh addressed specifically is data center water consumption – in the US, data center only consume one percent (1%) of potable water nationwide, and are only 5% of industrial water consumption.

Josh stated that when AWS enters a market, they try to find utilities (both electricity and water) where AWS doesn’t have a huge impact on their demand so as not to overwhelm the utilities. They also do not look for their rate, permitting, or other improvements to be “subsidized” by retail consumers, though he did state that he was not making that statement for the industry in general. He also said that AWS does have peak consumption limits in some markets, and they do work with the utilities to cut power consumption when required (like weather events, heat waves, etc.), while still delivering consistent services to their customers.

Undergrounding Innovations

Undergrounding electrical distribution infrastructure is a hot issue today, driven largely by weather outages, wildfire concerns, and aesthetics. The panel, which was moderated by Ben Lanz (Power Delivery Intelligence) and included Christopher Arnieri (Eversource Energy; Boston Area), Leslie Carter (Dominion Energy), Nick Rancis (National Grid Partners), and Trefor Fulks (PG&E), discussed the current trends in undergrounding. While much of undergrounding is focused on metro distribution lines, it is also being increasingly used for distribution substations and even long-haul transmission lines. In many senses, these last two areas are really “plowing new ground” (sorry for the bad pun!), dealing with issues such as:

• Cooling: high-tension transmission lines generate a fair amount of heat that must now be exhausted from undergrounded lines;
• Procuring or getting access to right-of-ways: especially problematic in metro areas and urban cores where land is very costly;
• Cost and material demands: conduit in particular has seen increased prices in the general market due to undergrounding;
• Deconflicting with other undergrounded infrastructure: you don’t want to hit a gas or oil pipeline when putting in underground electrical lines or distribution infrastructure; and
• Regulatory issues: protected environments, seismic and flooding concerns, etc.

While it is difficult to collect “hard data” on the positive impact of undergrounding, anecdotal evidence from Dominion with recent storms show significantly reduced outages, and much quicker power restoration times in places where lines have been undergrounded, reducing the overall lifecycle cost of undergrounding. Some of this learning also includes which infrastructure components should be undergrounded (and how deep) vs kept above grade, working with developers to include undergrounding in their planning for new developments, distance between enclosures (particularly in rural areas which don’t have “city blocks” which drive positioning decisions), and reducing or eliminating transmission line splices, which are problematic over the life of a transmission line. Overall, the trend for undergrounding looks very positive.

Thought Leadership: SC Nexus for Advanced Resilient Energy

The South Carolina (SC) Nexus for Advanced Resilient Energy is a program being driven by the SC Dept of Commerce, in partnership with the University of South Carolina, the Savannah River National Laboratory, Clemson University, and industry partners The Southern Company and Schnieder Electric, and funded by a $45M grant . The goal is to have three sites (at the universities and at Savannah River) that work on strategic grid resiliency for the benefit of the US utility Industry.

The SC Nexus includes “real” malware against a real-equipment test setup at Savannah River (the Grid-Enabled Cyber Operations Test Bed), The Carolina Institute for Battery Innovation at the University of South Carolina, and the Economic Development through Grid Emulation (EDGE) at Clemson University. All of these utilize not only computer simulations but also real mobile and in-field and grid-connected equipment to advance both grid resilience and to implement new technologies for the grid. Additionally, SC NEXUS is working on workforce education and training through the SC technical college system, to ensure that the right kinds of trades and other skills are available to support grid modernization.