GRID STRATEGY · ENERGY POLICY & INFRASTRUCTURE
Aligning Infrastructure with Grid Reality
By David Swank, CEO, i3 Power & Energy
There is a persistent gap between how energy infrastructure gets planned and how the grid actually works. It shows up everywhere: in generation projects designed around interconnection assumptions that do not survive contact with ISO queue reality, in transmission upgrades that address yesterday's congestion patterns while tomorrow's load growth emerges somewhere else entirely, and in data center developments that treat power availability as a procurement problem rather than a physical and operational constraint. Closing that gap is among the most important and most underappreciated challenges in energy infrastructure today.
RB Sloan and I sat in that seat. We know the challenges a utility CEO faces when a wave of new load or a flood of interconnection requests arrives faster than the system was built to absorb. The project sponsors on the other side of those requests were often sophisticated. The engineering was often excellent. What was missing was a granular, honest understanding of the grid as it actually operates, as distinct from how it is modeled in interconnection studies and transmission planning documents. Those documents are important, but they are not the same as operational reality.
The Planning Gap and Its Consequences
Energy infrastructure planning has historically operated on long time horizons with stable assumptions. Load growth was predictable. Generation mix was relatively fixed. Transmission was developed to serve known demand centers with known supply resources. That world is gone. The grid today is characterized by accelerating change: rapid growth in variable renewable generation, electrification-driven load shifts, and the emergence of large new load centers in locations and with demand profiles that existing infrastructure was simply not designed to serve.
The consequence of planning against outdated assumptions is infrastructure that performs poorly from its first day of operation. Generation assets that were modeled to dispatch at certain levels cannot reach those levels because congestion on transmission corridors they did not anticipate limits their output. Large loads that were planned on the assumption of available interconnection capacity discover that the queue ahead of them has pushed their connection date years into the future. In both cases, the underlying error is the same: infrastructure was planned against a model of the grid rather than against the grid itself.
“The most dangerous document in energy infrastructure development is an interconnection study that was accurate when it was written and has not been updated since.”
What Grid Alignment Actually Requires
Aligning infrastructure with grid reality requires engaging with the grid at a level of operational specificity that traditional project development rarely achieves. This means understanding not just whether interconnection capacity exists at a given point of delivery, but how that capacity will be available, at what hours, under what dispatch conditions, with what curtailment risk, over the operating life of the asset. It means understanding transmission congestion patterns well enough to anticipate how they will evolve as the regional generation mix changes and as new load comes online. And it means engaging with the ISO or RTO not just as a permitting authority but as an operational counterpart whose rules and market structures will fundamentally shape the economics of the asset being developed.
I cannot emphasize enough how much this analysis is undervalued at the front end of project development. The upfront cost of deep grid analysis is visible; the downstream cost of misalignment is diffuse and often attributed to market conditions rather than planning failures. A million dollars of rigorous grid analysis at the front of a project can prevent tens of millions of dollars of operational underperformance over its life. That trade is almost always worth making, and most developers are not making it.
The Role of Flexible Infrastructure
One of the most important lessons from the current grid transition is that flexibility has become as valuable as capacity. A generation asset that produces power when the grid needs it and can reduce output when it does not is worth significantly more than an asset of the same nameplate capacity that cannot respond to grid conditions. Similarly, a large load, whether a data center or an industrial facility, that can shift demand in response to grid signals creates value for itself and for the system it operates on, rather than simply consuming power as a fixed draw.
Designing infrastructure for flexibility requires understanding grid reality at a deep level. What are the price signals the market sends when the system is stressed? What operational requirements must a flexible resource meet to participate in ancillary services markets? How do these dynamics differ between the morning and evening peaks that characterize solar-heavy systems versus the more sustained demand peaks associated with extreme heat events? These are not abstract questions. They determine whether an asset earns its cost of capital or falls short of it.
Infrastructure That Earns Its Place on the Grid
At i3, we use the phrase "grid reality" as a design criterion, not just a market observation. Every project we develop is stress-tested against operational grid conditions, actual congestion patterns, actual curtailment risk, actual dispatch economics, before we commit capital. This produces facilities that are sometimes smaller, sometimes differently configured, and sometimes located in markets that were not the original development targets. It also produces bankable projects that perform as planned, rather than ones that discover misalignment after the ribbon is cut.
The energy transition is accelerating pressures that have been building for years. More renewable generation, more electrified load, more distributed resources, more complex market structures. All of these forces are making the gap between grid models and grid reality wider, not narrower. Infrastructure designed to close that gap, rather than plan around it, will deliver value across its full operating life. In an environment where the cost of being wrong has never been higher, grid alignment is not a refinement. It is the foundation.
The firms, developers, investors, operators, that learn to engage with the grid as it is rather than as it is modeled will be the ones that define the infrastructure of the next energy era. That is the standard we hold ourselves to at i3, and the standard I believe the industry must embrace broadly if we are going to build the grid the energy future actually requires.