Wire the Future—Accelerating the Build-out of Mega-Projects: Transmission, Renewables & Load

WIRE THE FUTURE is our vision to enable energy transition stakeholders to optimize reliability and cost as the demand for energy dramatically increases and advanced technologies become part of the solution. How can we help identify and enable transmission mega-projects: sets of generation, load and transmission projects related to a given corridor. Collaboration across utilities, developers, technology providers, and regulatory bodies throughout the journey of a line from early development to construction and later to optimization or reconductoring is key to how Ulteig creates a multifaceted approach to accelerate future forward transmission development. Thinking holistically early on in mega-project development can optimize fuller utilization of assets, resulting in lower cost per delivered MW.
1: Context: Much of the U.S. transmission infrastructure is over 50 years old. Extreme weather events and cyber attacks cause costly and dangerous challenges to maintaining reliability and getting power to where it’s needed. Further exacerbating the strain on an aging grid is the potential for a significant uptick in demand for electricity after stagnant growth over the past two decades. Many parts of the U.S. that were long on generation are seeing shortfalls. In both organized wholesale energy markets and in bilateral, longer-term contracts, the willingness to pay for capacity is driving unprecedented development.
2: Journey of a Line: The journey of a line breaks down what is needed and how consultants can support developers and utilities across the lifecycle of a transmission line. For game changing solutions, the focus is on mega-projects, where we can optimize costs by holistically considering the elements of new transmission infrastructure, multiple wind, solar and storage projects that tie into the new line and major new loads from data centers, chip manufacturing or hydrogen production that are served by the line. In the later stage of life for transmission, Ulteig identifies technologies and designs solutions including dynamic line rating and reconductoring to get more out of what is there at a lower cost than new builds.
3: Collaborate to Accelerate: Collaborating with industry partners, regulatory bodies and clients involved over the lifecycle of transmission advancement is key to accelerating the build out of critically needed new infrastructure. By doing so, we WIRE THE FUTURE — physically and figuratively. Faster investment with nearer term results will lower total cost outlays and lower the risks of increasing extreme weather events, cyber security threats and help meet the growth in demand for electricity.