It's Tuesday. Most planning models collapse thousands of physical lines into a handful of zones and a few pipes. That simplification is where the cheapest transmission option goes missing.
In today's edition:
🔌 Big Story: A Texas model prices restringing against new steel
⚡ Quick Hits: Palisades loads fuel, a firebrick battery
💰 Capital: SLB buys cooling for $4.1 billion
📋 Policy Watch: Oklo takes PJM to FERC
The Big Story
Reconductoring beats new steel in a high-growth ERCOT model
Evolved Energy Research modeled the ERCOT grid through 2040 under high load and generation growth and found that restringing existing lines with high-capacity conductors, at $10 billion, could avoid $30 billion of greenfield transmission. Greenfield would still be needed, at $35 billion. The firm modeled roughly 5,000 buses and 7,000 lines from public sources, evaluating upgrade choices inside a capacity expansion model on nodal power flow physics. It is a modeling study, published August 31.
"The moment you merge physical lines into a zone, you lose the information needed to choose between reconductoring and building new" Evolved Energy Research, via pv magazine USA, August 31, 2026
The model selects among reconductoring, greenfield, and voltage upgrades inside the optimization. Zonal models compress that nodal detail into a few pipes and lose the comparison.
The firm called the ERCOT case conservative, since the region suits long-distance buildout unusually well, and said reconductoring "matters even more" where greenfield is slower to permit.
The RIO model was built with the nonprofit ClearPath, which published a companion report urging wider use of high-capacity conductors.
Source: pv magazine USA
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Six from across the stack, from a reactor loading fuel to a record rooftop quarter.
Holtec began loading a 204-assembly core into the Palisades reactor vessel on Sunday, putting the Michigan plant in Mode 6 on the way to what would be the first restart of a shut-down US reactor. ANS Nuclear Newswire
PSE&G paired a $5,000 incentive with 0% on-bill financing for customer-owned home batteries in its GridSmart residential VPP, cutting against the third-party ownership model BNEF expects to dominate. Latitude Media
Electrified Thermal Solutions is developing a firebrick thermal battery that converts low-cost off-peak electricity into high-temperature industrial heat, at costs the company says are competitive with natural gas. pv magazine
Collective Energy built solar-plus-storage microgrids totaling roughly 200 kW of solar and 560 kWh of storage at four Arizona clinics that had no backup power, at no upfront cost, two live since July and two due by October. Microgrid Knowledge
Australia's Clean Energy Regulator logged 1 GW of rooftop solar in the April to June quarter, the first single quarter above a gigawatt, alongside more than 111,000 approved home batteries and 3.6 GWh of storage. RenewEconomy
Ørsted brought the 913 MW Borkum Riffgrund 3 into commercial operation, one of Germany's largest offshore wind farms. Clean Energy Wire
The Capital Stack
SLB pays $4.1 billion to put oilfield hardware into data center cooling
SLB agreed to buy heat exchanger and cooling equipment maker Kelvion for $3.4 billion in cash, $4.1 billion including debt, from Apollo-managed funds and minority holder Triton, Reuters reported. The purchase moves thermal management from an adjacent line to a core one for an oilfield services major.
Source: Reuters
Also in the capital stack:
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners took full ownership of the Gawara Baya project in North Queensland and reached financial close on 408 MW of wind paired with a 104 MW BESS running grid-forming inverters, which supply system strength a synchronous machine would otherwise provide. Energy-Storage.news
The Philippines' geothermal de-risking facility drew proposals from 12 companies, an early read on whether public cover for drilling risk pulls private capital into geothermal's riskiest stage. ThinkGeoEnergy
Policy Watch
Oklo asked FERC to order PJM to reinstate its 750 MW mixed-technology project after PJM removed it from the interconnection study cycle, reportedly because it never demonstrated the project could ride through a sudden grid voltage drop. Grid code performance is becoming a gating item for advanced nuclear queue positions. Utility Dive
California lawmakers sent Governor Newsom a bill requiring utilities to offer to subsidize customer home electrification as an alternative to replacing aging gas service lines. If signed, it extends the non-pipe alternative approach past existing pilots aimed at mains. Heatmap News
Pennsylvania directs roughly $180 million a year to waste-coal generation through the Tier II tranche of its Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards, plus about $50 million a year in tax credits, Inside Climate News reported. The fleet supplies about 3% of state power, more than solar, while reform bill H.B. 501 has stalled. Inside Climate News
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