Experts tell CFTC advisory committee the path to Net Zero will require massive generation, storage and transmission investment

At the CFTC's EMAC meeting in Kansas City, consultants and market participants detailed the scale of infrastructure and cost challenges involved in decarbonizing power systems and meeting growing electricity demand.

Matt Len, a consulting lead on power markets, told the committee that reaching anywhere near 100% clean electricity would require significant overbuilding of generation and stor-age and large investments in transmission to move power from resource-rich regions to load centers. "Getting anywhere close to 100% is going to require significant infrastructure investment on both a power supply standpoint as well as a delivery," Len said, adding that costs rise nonlinearly as systems push toward full decarbonization.

Len highlighted a narrow evening period (roughly 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.) as a reliability challenge where dispatchable, low-carbon resources or long-duration storage are most valuable. He showed ISO-level studies (ISO New England example) where deep decarbonization portfolios required near-orders-of-magnitude increases in wind, solar and storage capacity and would add tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in generation and transmission investment on current cost assumptions.

Utility and industry members raised affordability concerns for consumers, noting electricity price inflation and the risk that customers with low incomes will be hit hardest. Participants also discussed interconnection-queue backlogs, the potential value of keeping some dispatchable baseload or extending lives of existing units, and the implications of large new loads (data centers, electrified industry) for planning and hedging markets.

EMAC members asked staff for continued work on how transmission planning and interconnection reform can be sequenced with generation additions, how to value optionality (e.g., carbon capture, nuclear) versus pure renewables-plus-storage paths, and how market instruments might help hedging during transition.