Ohio House Energy Committee - 3-18-2026

I call this meeting of the House Energy Committee to order. Will the clerk please call the roll?

Matthews. Here.

Brennan. Happy to be here.

Davila.

Glassburn.

Humphrey. Klopfenstein.

Here. Lorenz.

Odioso.

Ray. Here.

Here. Rob Blaisdell.

Rogers.

Thomas. Here.

Williams.

Mr. Chairman, I motion to amend with Substitute Bill 1744-6.

The sub-bill is a result of feedback from interested parties and serves to clarify its intent. A few key notes to change. First, it removes a consolidated bill provision and replaces it with clear billing standards that EDUs must implement in their next rate case. Additionally, it introduces stronger protections for customers who do not opt into demand response programs by ensuring EDUs cannot adjust their energy consumption. It also specifies that EDUs cannot retain more than 6% of the revenue they earn, ensuring that the funds are directed back into running these programs and rewarding customers who participate. Finally, the bill requires EDUs to provide data to CREST providers in a secure format near real-time, enabling both parties to run more efficient and consumer-friendly programs.

Good afternoon, Chair Holmes, Vice Chair Matthews, and Ranking Member Rader. My name is Sarah Perot, and I'm the Director of the Office of the Federal Energy Advocate within the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. It is a pleasure to be here with you today to speak about advanced transmission technologies, or we love our acronyms, ATTs for short, which is a topic that the FEA team has engaged on through our advocacy work at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and PJM Interconnection. Through substitute House Bill 15, the General Assembly has proactively taken steps on ATTs. Ohio's electric utilities are now required to address potential use or investment in ATTs in their long-term forecast reports filed annually with the PUCO. Additionally, the Ohio Power Siting Board, to approve an application for an electric transmission line, must find and determine that the facility must consider implementing cost-effective ATTs to maximize the value, expand capacity, or improve the reliability of the facility. I will focus today, however, on the ATT report that was submitted by the PUCO to the General Assembly and published on the PUCO's website on February 26, 2026. Section 7 of substitute House Bill 15 required the PUCO to conduct a study to evaluate the potential use or deployment of advanced transmission technologies as defined in section 4906.01 of the revised code by public utilities to enable public utilities to safely, reliably, efficiently, and cost-effectively meet electric system demand and provide safe, reliable and affordable electric utility service to customers. In addition to prescribing a list of components for the study, Substitute House Bill 15 directed the PUCO to hold two public workshops to review comments from stakeholders The workshops occurred on September 16 2025 and September 19 2025 and several stakeholders offered comments in support of ATTs as an alternative to more costly new transmission build and as a tool to maximize use of existing transmission assets. Two Ohio utilities with transmission assets in Ohio spoke about their experience with ATTs, particularly advanced conductors and one vendor also addressed advanced conductors. Consistent with the General Assembly's guidance, the ATT report addresses the attributes, potential for use or deployment, and several other aspects of ATTs, including both advanced conductors and grid-enhancing technologies. Grid-enhancing technologies, or GETs, include dynamic line ratings, advanced power flow control and transmission topology optimization the report also examines ATT legislation in other states and use customer investment in ATT's FERC PJM and PUCO efforts to support ATT's as well as FEA advocacy opportunities there are several primary takeaways from the ATT report first as results of substitute House Bill 15 Ohio is a leader among the states through its adoption of measures to advance ATT's as an alternative to traditional transmission solutions I'm on minority of the other pgm states have also adopted requirements for utilities to study plan or deploy cost-effective ATT's the report also notes that at the federal level for continues to evaluate ATT deployment most recently in the context of transmission planning where it has has required transmission providers to consider ATTs in both long-term and near-term processes for the development of regional transmission facilities. Another takeaway in the ATT report is that while ATTs work in different ways, each one can be deployed quickly and cost-effectively compared to new transmission build, and they all may be needed to ensure grid reliability. The ATT report concludes that in all tools in the toolbox approach, including ATT deployment, is needed to meet surging demand on the electric grid and to ensure that the build-out of new transmission includes optimization of existing transmission assets, particularly to meet short-term needs. At the same time, ATTs remain relatively new, and utilities are understandably cautious when it comes to how ATTs will perform and interact with grid operations in real time. A case-by-case consideration of ATTs is therefore necessary to determine whether any given technology can be beneficially and cost-effectively deployed in a particular location. F.E.A. will continue as part of our federal advocacy efforts to engage on this important topic at PGM and FERC. By statute, F.E.A. is directed to monitor the activities of FERC and other federal agencies and to advocate for the interests of Ohio's retail electric service consumers. Although the Office of the Federal Energy Advocate carries out many other tasks on behalf of PUCO our primary task and daily focus is to strongly advocate for Ohio's energy interests at the regional and national levels as a result of recent FERC orders and the requirements of substitute House Bill 15 the PUCO and OPSB will have considerable information provided by utilities and project developers to evaluate ATTs and to determine where they can be beneficially deployed this information will play a part in ensuring that electric consumers in Ohio continue to benefit from reliable service at just and reasonable rates I would like to convey my appreciation for the General Assembly's leadership on this important topic and for the FEA team's diligent work on the ATT study and report. Thank you.

First of all, is there anything from your experience doing the report that stood out that any unique opportunities or things you think this committee should be focused on, technologies or locations or concepts that you thought would be good takeaways for us? Thank you for the question, Mr. Chairman. The advanced conductors portion of the report is one that I would point you to. We found in conversations we've had with the utility companies and other stakeholders that there's already some good work occurring there. So I feel like we have some momentum going in that area specifically that would benefit from continued review by the General Assembly. We've had instances of a couple of the utilities that are very much looking at this on a case-by-case basis. They're working closely with EPRI, which is a research and development organization that all of the utilities work closely with. EPRI is also doing some good work in the area of advanced conductors, and that's just one of the areas we feel like it really has some potential. When you look at our infrastructure, a lot of the transmission lines on the grid are aging, and there's a lot of potential to reconductor the lines using advanced conductors. Again, very much needs to be a case-by-case assessment, but definitely some potential there.

Thank you.

Thank you. Chair Holmes, Vice Chair Matthews, Ranking Member Rader, and members of the House Energy Committee, thank you for the opportunity. I'm Keitlin Savage and I am part of Google's energy market development team where I work to align legislative policies with regulatory work, industry partnerships, and commercial energy products. Within that portfolio, my specific focus is on transmission. Having previously led our regional and market development in Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, and across PJM, my work today focuses on building the national frameworks and market reforms necessary to power two major economic engines, the Internet economy and the broader reindustrialization of the United States. I would like to begin today by commending the committee's leadership on House Bill 15 last year. By removing critical barriers to behind the meter generation, this legislation has already enabled the approval of nearly two gigawatts of behind the meter energy projects. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, behind the meter generation can be helpful for accelerating speed to power as part of a comprehensive approach to unlock grid capacity. Crucially, House Bill 15 has also opened the door for advanced transmission technologies that can unlock speed to power. House Bill 15 demonstrates that Ohio can lead the country in solving complicated energy problems, and Google is committed to doing our part to help accomplish this. To date, Google has invested $7 billion in Ohio, supporting thousands of jobs and hundreds of thousands of local businesses. Our data centers in Lancaster, New Albany, and Columbus also provide essential digital infrastructure for foundational Ohio institutions like Huntington Bank and the Cleveland Clinic. Crucially, building this infrastructure relies directly on our Ohio supply chain. We are proud partners of Ohio companies like Vertiv, a Westerville-based cooling manufacturer that has grown to a $90 billion global powerhouse, and the Superior Group, a century-old Columbus electrical contractor that has massively expanded its skilled workforce to build our hyperscale facilities. When the data center industry grows, Ohio companies scale alongside us. Across the country, however, the United States is facing critical challenges to meeting the current moment. Fragmented and congested electricity grids across the country are increasingly tapped out, and many can no longer support electrical load growth. Transmission lines, many built more than 50 years ago, are now running out of capacity. Adding to the challenge, new transmission infrastructure to power growth and create a more affordable energy system can take over a decade to permit and build. Google is working to overcome these challenges by championing first-of-a-kind initiatives designed to unlock greater capacity from the infrastructure that we already have. Our goal is to bolster greater reliability while strictly controlling costs, ultimately reducing energy bills for all of the customers on the system. Because we believe technology growth must go hand-in-hand with manufacturing growth, I also represent Google on the board of the New American Industrial Alliance, working to rebuild America's industrial strength and expand our domestic manufacturing capabilities. Ultimately, all of this work is driven by a core philosophy that we call grid citizenship. At Google, our data centers operate with the mindset that our mission as an energy team must always be to provide a net benefit to the broader electric grid. When Google comes to your community, we want to bring investments with us that make your grid stronger and more affordable. At Google, we are driven by a philosophy of local partnership that is central to our work with the Ohio Grid Innovation Fund. Last year, Google invested $1 million to support the local energy landscape and we look forward to sharing details of scaling this program up later this year. Through the fund, we have collaborated with regional partners, including the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, people working cooperatively, and local community action agencies to deliver meaningful energy affordability solutions for Ohioans So where does transmission fit into all of this To understand our corporate energy strategy today we actually have to look at the physical wires In the last decade the data center industry has made enormous highly publicized investments on the generation side of the grid Accelerated nuclear, renewables, energy storage. However, we found that the wires themselves show some of the greatest and fastest potential for efficiency gains. It might surprise you to learn that the standard power lines our electric grid commonly relies on today, known as ACSR conductors, were first invented in 1908, over a century ago. When you think about the enormous technological leaps we've made in computers, phones, cars in the last century, the grid has largely stood still. Yet this transmission system remains the physical backbone of our country's economy. economy. Just to pause for a second, I could not imagine if America's modern economy today were forced to run on rotary phones. That is essentially what we are doing with our grid. By upgrading our power lines from that century-old design to modern conductor technology, we can push significantly more power through the exact same corridors, squeezing more capacity out of the system that we already have. Most importantly, this results in real grid reliability benefits and cost savings for every single customer on the system. So to address today's grid bottlenecks in Ohio, Google took a data-driven approach. When you're a large business looking to expand your operations, you're quoted a wait time of many years for a new interconnection with a local utility, fixing the grid is no longer just a technical issue. It is an urgent economic development imperative for the entire state and the entire country. We heard clearly from people across Ohio that data centers needed to bring more solutions to the table. At first, we recognized that as an energy customer, we were missing critical information. So in November of 2024, Google initiated a transmission solution study with electric power engineers to better understand the specific grid constraints facing the central Ohio region. Because we knew this had to be a collaborative effort, we engaged closely with the Ohio Manufacturers Association, Ohio Blockchain Council, Ohio Chamber Research Foundation, Ohio Consumers Council, many others, and stakeholder workshops. We held over a six-month period to gather feedback and guide the study's direction. We have found that advanced conductors showed the absolute highest potential to resolve grid constraints, particularly from a speed-to-power and cost-savings perspective. What are advanced conductors? After my remarks, you will hear directly from CTC Global, a U.S. manufacturer, which makes advanced conductors for overhead power lines that improve the efficiency, capacity, reliability, and resiliency of electric power grids worldwide. But put simply, advanced conductors are modern power lines that replace the heavy steel core of traditional wires with a strong, lightweight composite core, allowing them to carry up to twice as much electricity without sagging. Because you're essentially just swapping out old wires for new ones on existing transmission towers, you can potentially double the transmission capacity within an existing corridor. This allows us to lower costs and build dramatically faster than traditional greenfield projects. In most cases, you don't need to acquire new land, you don't need new rights of way, you can completely avoid the years-long permitting challenges that often install new infrastructure. CTC Global is an American manufacturer of this highly proven technology. We want to bring that innovation home here in Ohio and put it to work on the American grid. So how are we at Google supporting these technologies? Google has an established history of paying a carbon-free energy premium on our power generation to help subsidize technologies like advanced geothermal and advanced nuclear. We wanted to structure a similar framework on the wires and transmission side to subsidize next generation transmission technologies and unlock those widespread reliability and cost savings benefits I just mentioned for everyone on the grid As we looked into the issue we found that traditional regulatory structures and standard planning timelines which often approach a decade or more were too slow to keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital economy. We realized that to truly accelerate this market and break through the status quo, we needed to make a strong public commitment to upgrading the grid more quickly, more proactively, and more efficiently. So last June, Google announced a first-of-a-kind collaboration with CTC Global. Our goal was simple, provide speed to power for Google while simultaneously delivering grid reliability and cost savings benefits to all customers on the system. During our outreach in Ohio and across the country, utilities consistently gave us three reasons why they were not using advanced conductors today. First, they carry a higher upfront cost for the hardware than that hundred-year-old technology I mentioned earlier. Their linemen didn't know how to install them, and they didn't have enough engineering bandwidth to perform the necessary grid integration studies. So we immediately set out to remove all three of those market barriers. First, Google is offering financial assistance to cover cost premiums associated with installing advanced conductors. Second, we are offering workforce training for linemen to learn how to safely install the technology. And finally, we are offering to pay for any costs associated with performing the necessary grid integration studies. In short, Google is putting our own capital on the line to absorb the financial and operational friction so utilities can confidently modernize the grid today. Where do these efforts stand right now? In June, we issued a request for information to identify specific high-impact transmission projects that would benefit from deployment of advanced conductors. We received over 30 proposals across the country, including several in Ohio, and we narrowed that down to a short list for a full request for proposals in just two weeks. I mentioned that 10-year planning horizon earlier. That's very fast in this industry. However, as we attempt to execute these additional customer-led transmission upgrades, we've encountered three systemic challenges that this committee should be aware of. First is a lack of transparency. As an energy customer that is willing to privately fund these upgrades, it is incredibly difficult for us to obtain the basic information from utilities that are needed to make an investment decision. Critical elements, like the exact steps needed to qualify a new technology or granular data on the health of existing transmission towers are fully controlled by the utility. Customers are left hoping for timely replies. The situation stands in stark contrast to the generation market, where competitive market price, volume, and interconnection information exists and is broadly accessible, which enables generation developers to efficiently come to their own investment decisions and deploy capital to improve America's grid. As a hypothetical example, a customer could identify and be willing to fund a $5 million grid upgrade that provides $25 million in system benefits to everyone on the grid. But customers like Google today do not have the transparency or regulatory oversight to pursue those solutions. There is absolutely nothing preventing the transmission owner from utiliterally changing those costs from $5 million to $10 million to $25 million or even $50 million under the status quo. Second is fragmented utility standards, the The process of certifying new hardware with individual utilities and their operating companies has added unexpected time and costs to our initial deployments. CTC Global will speak more specifically to the challenges we are seeing in this space. Third is a missing playbook. There is simply no standard regulatory playbook for customer-led investments in proactive transmission infrastructure. We recognize that transmission is a complex web of federal, regional, and state oversight, but we cannot let that complexity lead to paralysis. There are willing third parties, like Google, ready to invest in self-funded solutions that could create regional grid benefits and we can do this quickly These customer approaches are not theoretical Viable pathways already exist under both state and federal law but we need much more widespread acceptance comfort familiarity and frankly, urgency among utilities and regulators when it comes to using reasonable arrangements and other contracts that allow for fully customer-funded transmission upgrades. These contracts will allow large customers like Google to opt into paying more for investments that benefit everyone. Fortunately, there are state-driven solutions that are entirely within Ohio's control. Health Bill 15 required the Public Utilities Commission to issue a report on advanced transmission technologies, which was a vital step forward. Moving ahead, we have two specific asks of this committee. First, we would like to encourage a formal Public Utilities Commission comment period to identify and remove systemic barriers preventing private capital from strengthening Ohio's grid. We would like to understand what specific barriers prevent the use of existing legal authority to competitively and privately fund grid upgrades that benefit the overall system, what granular data is required of the utility for third-party verification, and how can a new Ohio Office of Energy provide the necessary technical oversight. Second is a request for the committee to collaborate with Google on new forward-looking transmission policies that explicitly encourage rather than merely allow customer-led grid investments. To be clear, these should not be policies that further entrench broken systems that contributed to current challenges and inefficiencies we are experiencing today. In closing, I want to leave with a final thought on how data centers can serve as a catalyst for broader ecosystem benefits. We see the incredible economic momentum of this industry in Ohio through the success stories of companies like Vertiv and Superior Group, but our physical infrastructure must be allowed to keep pace with that growth. The main takeaway for the committee today is that data centers are not just large energy consumers, they can also be powerful financial engines for strengthening Ohio's grid. We are bringing the capital, the technology, and a deep willingness to invest in the state's infrastructure. To put this in perspective, the scale of the data center build-out we are experiencing today actually dwarfs the investment associated with the transcontinental railroad or even the national highway system. Massive infrastructure requires massive capital, which Google is willing to provide, and we should be channeling that private capital towards investments that benefit everyone. The capital, the technology, and the demand are all here, but to truly realize those benefits for every customer on the grid, we need to make sure that both large customers and our utilities have the transparency, regulatory ability, and tools necessary to put that capital to work. Google is ready to fund these advanced technologies today. We just need to work together to remove those roadblocks to build. Thank you for your time and the opportunity to present. I would like to introduce the CTC Global team to discuss the technical aspects of their advanced conductor technology.

Thank you so much, Chairman Holmes. Chairman, members of the committee, my name is Theodore Paradise. I am the chief policy and grid strategy officer for a company called CTC Global. We are the largest manufacturer of advanced conductors in the world. We're in 65 countries. We invented advanced conductors over two decades ago, and the chairman actually has this, and I believe you may have a little bit of the advanced conductor by your seat there, and I'll explain what these are. But I have some slides today that will help talk through advanced conductors and hopefully give you a really solid understanding of what advanced conductors are. And a quick question, technical logistics is, do I have to push a button, or are they... Okay. Let's see here. Oh, my God. God, all right. That felt like a little miracle, so wonderful. So we'll get into it. So as I said, my name is Theodore Paradise. I have a career of 28 years or so in the utility space. I worked for many years, 15 years, at a regional transmission organization. Your regional transmission organization here is PJM. whereas I was responsible for all the regulatory issues around transmission planning, grid operations, NERC criteria. I worked with SPP, MISO, PJM, California ISO, and other ISOs and RTOs to write many of the current transmission planning rules that we have in place in North America today. Transmission for me is a deep passion. It is the great enabler. It's existential to make all of the other pieces of the economy work. And what I saw in my years at the RTO and as a lawyer representing investor-owned utilities at FERC is transmission is very hard to do. It takes seven years. It takes ten years. Sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes the projects never go anywhere, and they eventually die. So transmission is incredibly important. It's also incredibly difficult. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how advanced conductors figure into that situation, and some of the comments that have already been made, I think, lead nicely into that. So a couple quick things about CTC. I mentioned that we are in 65 countries. The technology was invented over two decades ago. It's very mature. So today we have, just from CTC, and there are other companies that do advanced conductors to, it's not a single vendor product, we at CTC have over 140,000 miles of our conductor deployed around the globe. In countries like India, over 60% of the energy flowing in and out of India's capital are on our conductors. So this is not a new technology. This is a widely deployed technology. It's a widely proven technology. I'm joined by James Berger, who will talk a little bit about some of his experience and his years at AEP deploying ACCC projects a little later in the slide deck. One of the things that I think really stands out, though, This is a map of the U.S., and it's hard to see maybe, depending on how you're looking at this slide, but there are numbers on each state. And those numbers aren't very big. When I say that there's 140,000 miles of ACCC deployed globally in over 65 countries, 92% of that is outside of the U.S. In the U.S., we've tended to have very incremental load growth. It hasn't been that big. It may be a percent a year, sometimes even less. And we had a transmission planning process, looked 10 years out. You could see the load coming. It was very predictable. That's plenty of time to get something sighted, even with sighting being difficult, to exercise imminent domain if you had to. And so we built new lines. And then when lines were in rough shape, we often would tear down lines. Some people call it a wreck and rebuild or a rebuild and would rebuild a new line instead of reconductoring. So reconductoring has really been used in the U.S. where there was a long river crossing. You just couldn't get another right-of-way. It was your first option when you had no other options. In other places around the world, it's been used much more widely. In Europe, in India I mentioned so Asia Pacific Africa Middle East there are much more extensive uses of advanced conductor Places like India that I mentioned are doing in some cases the Industrial Revolution and the AI revolution all at once and the need for power is incredible So the way that they can do it the quickest, the cheapest, is what they're very interested in. So what is an advanced conductor? So this leads you to... Tyler, I think, put these around, and I appreciate that because this is helpful to actually have the show-and-tell time. So Caitlin mentioned that at the start of the 20th century, early 1900s, the ACSR was designed. And the basic idea of the transmission wire that you see as you drive down the road is that there is a steel member in the middle. And that's not for moving energy. That's for strength. And then it's stranded with aluminum. Early uses of transmission wire had more copper involved in it, and things like World War is going to change that quickly. So what happens here is that the aluminum moves the electricity. The steel is the strength member. And as you push power through a conductor, there's resistance. That resistance creates heat. And that heat is why something like an electric stove works. If you just push more power through metal, it will heat up. And as you heat that up, as we know, blacksmiths making horseshoes, steel becomes malleable. That creates the thermal limit of a transmission line. This is the most power that we can put in because that is the hottest we want to run it because this is the sag that starts to happen. If you don't limit that, you will take this all the way to the ground. So that is a limitation of sort of the property of steel as the strength member. So advanced conductors. A little over a few decades ago, the steel was replaced with carbon composites. So carbon composite, 5 to 1 strength to weight ratio of steel. So it's very light and it's very strong. This is why we build things like airplanes and fighter jets out of carbon composites. And that allows you to carry more aluminum, so you can put more aluminum on it. And you're saving weight because you don't have the steel member. So Caitlin mentioned you can double the amount of energy. So the way that that happens is more aluminum is put on the conductor. The carbon doesn't react to heat. The carbon doesn't sag. So this gets really hot. You've got the weight on it, and the carbon is non-reactive to heat. So that allows you to double the amount of power in the existing right-of-way by changing the wire from this to an advanced conductor that you have a little piece of in front of you. So that is the key sort of essential defining difference. And there's a little picture on this slide here that you can see in the corner. On one side is ACSR, and you'll see a really deep sag there. And then to the left of that is ACCC, which is the denominator for the advanced conductor that CTC makes. All right, so the higher capacity we talked about, the other piece of this that's interesting is when you put more aluminum on the conductor, you reduce the amount of resistance. So I mentioned you put power through, there's resistance, it gets hot. That heat is nothing but electricity being lost into the air, so that's an inefficiency. You can think about this if you think about incandescent light bulb versus an LED light bulb. The LED light bulb might be 13 watts and make the same light as the 100 watts incandescent bulb The difference there is energy being lost to heat which is why the Easy Bake Oven works if any of you had that Kids today cannot cook brownies with an LED bulb. It's, I'm sure, very frustrating if they've tried. But it's the same sort of concept. So when you put more aluminum on the conductor, resistance is lowered. That means that more power is able to move through that conductor and not be lost as heat. And what that means is that more of the power that you generate is actually delivered as electricity to the end user. So that can be really significant. So up to 40% reduction in line losses. In a project that James will talk about in a few minutes, that was significant. That was several million dollars, I think $15 million a year in avoided losses just from that found. That was not the purpose of the project, But that delivery of that energy that previously would have been lost to heat resulted in significant ongoing cost savings. Caitlin talked about this, and this is important, obviously, for new manufacturing, for economic growth, and for reducing consumer costs. Reduce project costs. So I talked about transmission can take seven years or ten years or longer. If you're reconductoring a line, that really is changing out wire on the conductor. So it's not new siting. You're not creating a new view impact, et cetera. This also actually has benefits for new lines. We talk a lot about speed to power with advanced conductors for the reconductoring. But if you're using them for new lines as well, you can often go lower with the towers. And the reason for that is because you have less sag. And you can use fewer towers. And those sorts of benefits can mitigate resistance or opposition in siting cases as well. In addition to lowering overall project costs, one of the things that we find is, Caitlin mentioned the upfront cost of an advanced conductor is more, and that's true. But as a project, if you talk about the cost of the steel structures and the foundations and going lower or wider, we see that the actual project costs with advanced conductors for new builds can be less. And then enhanced reliability and resistance. I have some great slides on that that I'll talk about, but that strength of the carbon fiber comes into play. In our U.S. manufacturing facility, which is in Southern California, where we're a major exporter because of the global market, we hang the equivalent of 8 to 10 F-150 trucks of weight off that little core that you see in the middle, depending on the core size. And it's an incredibly strong material. So we do that past that weight until we can break it, and it's well past the tolerances that we set it for. But it's really impressive to see, and that is something that you're all welcome to see if you come out to Irvine for a tour. All right. Okay, I'm just going to do a couple slides for you quick. I think the committee is probably really well aware of this. But this goes back to my many years in the RTO world and around energy markets and load growth and sort of the drivers. Why are we talking about all of this? So I won't belabor it too much, as I'm sure you've spent a lot of time focused on this. But I mentioned that 1% load growth, the 10-year planning horizon, you know, up to that challenge. And what we have now with low growth is just much, much faster, exponentially larger than that. And so that creating energy cost impacts that predate data centers There were retirements of units electrification other things happening that were driving energy costs higher But it's really sort of putting a focus on, okay, great, we have this load growth and we have these lines, the interconnection queue of new generation willing to serve that load. Supply-demand, that should work out. Why do we see these big capacity market spikes in PGM? Why is energy cost as the energy market clearing costs going up? And that's because connecting the load with the new supply is the transmission. And transmission, as we've talked about, takes a long time. So we're seeing this load growth. We're seeing these energy costs. And we're not seeing transmission that's keeping pace in the way that's needed to add the supply so that you can have the cheaper, more efficient resources, so that you can move power around the system. And these are just some charts and graphs of some of the load growth that we see over 5% through 2030. In the bottom corner there, the capacity clearing prices in PJM. And keep in mind, we're talking about a $16 billion capacity clearing price in PJM. That's not amortized over 40 years like transmission. That's a single-year recovery if you're talking about a capacity market cost. And as we go down through another utility, Dayton Power and Light, similar significant load growth. And here's a point that kind of makes it. This is a quote from something that PJM was writing about around recent capacity auction clearing price. They pointed out that there's 57 gigawatts of generation in the PJM interconnection process with approved interconnection agreements. I used to lead the team at ISO New England that did interconnection studies and agreements on the regulatory side, the rules, and we would look at these things. And the hardest part was just getting to an interconnection agreement. And people, oh, I've got my interconnection agreement. I'm all set. What we see now is you can have 57 gigawatts of approved interconnection agreements. The interconnection queue is no longer the issue, and they're still unwilling to bid into a capacity auction and take on that obligation because there are questions around various pieces of equipment, including transmission. Is the transmission going to be there if I take on that capacity obligation? So that is a great example of real-world costs that you can start to mitigate when you start to add grid headroom, so there's places for that generation, that supply, to interconnect to. This is a little bit of a pulling together of some of these points, but it's really on the cost of it. And I mentioned James is going to talk about this in a little bit with a specific example. But when you talk about adding capacity with a reconductor, that's 75% less than building the new line. So I could add the capacity with the new line. I could add capacity with the reconductor, 75% less. It's substantially lower costs if you design a rebuild to use advanced conductors because you can lower the structure cost and the foundation size, which dwarf the cost of the conductor. And, of course, I mentioned completing the projects faster allows you to start to harness some of these energy market efficiencies much faster. I'm going to move off sort of the structure of advanced conductors in a moment, but I wanted to highlight this. This is something we just announced, and we've been working on it for several years. And Google's a partner with us on this as well with Advanced Analytics. Oh, I've got to do my next slide here. Thanks, Galen. So this is what we call grid vista. So we take the same composite core of ACCC, and it's otherwise exactly the same. You can put it up on lines interchangeably. But what we did was we put fiber optics through the center. We have that already just to test the core health. So is the transmission line having any issues? That's been around for years. What we've done now is a live data-enabled course. So you hear about things like dynamic line ratings. Those will be a sensor that's put on a line every few miles, for example, and gives you a reading of temperature. By putting the fiber optic through the line, every inch of the line now can do a reading of temperature. The wind pushing against the line will register in a control room. If there's a branch on the line, it can be seen. if there's ice load to very granular along the whole span of the transmission line, what the ice load is, what the weight is. If someone shot at the line, you will see a hot spot that can be located within inches of where that gunshot damage is. If the line is galloping, sort of a movement of the line in the wind, you will see that. And so that gives control room operators real-time insight into what the whole span of the line is doing and also what's going on around the line. If there's a wildfire burning under the line, you would see that as well. And then vibration awareness can provide other near sensing. Lightning strikes, gunshots, those sorts of things can show up as acoustic signals. So this is something that we're now doing as a very, very smart version of advanced conductors. It does all the things of double the capacity and the reduced losses. It just now makes the transmission line itself aware. And then if you combine that with Tapestry, which is the Google Maps of the grid that Google has, and Google Cloud Analytics, you have a grid that can start to really have some real-time, deep insights into what's going on and how to optimize that. Do I really have to start up that oil unit? Because it might cost $5 million to start up that oil unit. Or is the grid showing me that I really have more capacity in real time across the whole span? Is it healthy, et cetera? So Caitlin said, you know, we haven't integrated much on the grid for a long time. Advanced conductors themselves are a big innovation, but now we have even more significant innovations on the grid. There's a few other slides in here that I'm not going to spend a ton of time on, but there are great studies out there. UC Berkeley and Grid Lab did one on reconductoring. They actually looked at reconductoring the whole country. And they have great cost comparison data around new builds in this case versus reconductoring. So I'm going to leave that in there as something for the committee members to refer to. But I'm going to move now to an actual project in AEP that my colleague James Berger, who spends 40 years at AEP in transmission, is going to talk to, and James will introduce himself.

Thanks, James. So the speed there I think is good. There was a significant project that was live lines, so keeping the lines energized. Since then, project replacements, reconductors are even faster. We just did one with the grid operator in the Netherlands tenant. It was 24 kilometers a little under 20 miles 380 kV so around a 345 equivalent It was done live line We started that project in September of 2024 It was energized and completely finished by May of 2025, so about eight months to do that project. Again, that was high voltage. Couldn't get an outage, so they did it live line. Couldn't get any right-of-way. and so a very, very effective way to do speed to power in a cost-effective way. So there are other cost examples here, and they all look kind of similar, so I was taking a look at it. And I'm not going to spend too much time on it, but we have many of these that we can share with the committee if there's interest. Southern California Edison's a significant user of ACCC as well. So in this case, there was an alternative for ACSR. That was going to be $135 million. The ACCC was $48 million. Time to completion for the ACSR project, a little bit optimistic at 48 months. ACCC was 18 months. So we reduced the SAG, which there was a SAG violation issue, increased the line capacity. In this case, they weren't trying to maximize it. but we did add 60% as part of mitigating the SAG violation and reduced the line losses. I'm just going to spend a couple minutes on this, and this is just around strength. I mentioned if you went to the Irvine facility and saw the strength testing. The carbon composite is incredibly strong, and it's also fire-resistant. It has two wildfire benefits, which matter to some states more than others. One is that there's the mitigation of the sag, so vegetation contacts are less of an issue. The other is if it is in a fire, it holds up incredibly well. This was a fire in NV Energy's footprint in Nevada. The conductor was on wood structures. It burned through. The conductor went to the ground. But the conductor itself was undamaged, so they were able to hoist it back up and restore service fairly quickly. This one is in Oklahoma. This was a conductor that OGE put in in 2006. In 2013, there was a big tornado. If you're ever around Oklahoma, they talk about it. The more tornado, I think this is the tornado that caused the revisions to the tornado wind scale. So it was a very significant tornado through a shipping container up into the tower, caused a vibration. That caused the aluminum to split, but you'll see that the core is intact on that left side picture. The aluminum is all kind of frayed around it. The tension of the core kept the towers up. Keeping the towers up meant that to do restoration, they needed to do a splice instead of trying to put towers back up and redo the whole thing, and it made the restoration from that storm much, much faster. It's a great illustration of the strength, and it's hard to do something in a lab, like throw a shipping container at something. So in this case, it was a terrible tornado, but it was really an interesting case study in terms of the strength of advanced conductors. So some of these have been mentioned. I just going to do a quick wrap of some of these things that are out there right now There a lot of speed initiatives that are happening at the state level and at the federal level So we talked about HB 15 some of the key elements of that evaluating the advanced conductors and then identify how those technologies can perform or outperform, cost, ease of deployment, the system performance, and then recommend how those technologies can move forward. So those are all things that have been talked about as part of the discussion of HB 15. There's also speed to power initiatives at the federal level. Chair Holmes, you mentioned the SPARC program that's on the right here. And that is a new program from the U.S. Department of Energy, really focused on reconducting and speed to power. It's moving very fast. Caitlin talked about the timelines that we had for our RFI last summer in a matter of weeks, and Department of Energy is really moving on that kind of timescale as well, so perhaps we inspired them. But concepts are due early April full applications on May 20th. The Department of Energy is also putting out loans. AEP has a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for reconducting and rebuild. I don't have visibility into those projects and what will ultimately be done with that, but it's to make the point that there is money available from the TOE. And when you combine that with what Caitlin talked about, the Google CTC partnership, capital is not the issue here. Technology and the maturity of the technology is not an issue here. I think what we're really up against in some cases is process. We have the technology, we have the capital to deploy these systems in the U.S. at the scale that we're doing it globally already. So while the Spark program is great, while other initiatives can be exciting, what we see is that even with the capital out there, the speed of adoption could be faster than it is. So I'm going to just, the wrap-up here, I think the advanced conductor benefits for Ohio, affordability, we talked about that, the two times transmission capacity at a quarter of the cost of new build and reducing those congested points, which really has market, energy market and capacity market impacts, is huge. When I think about the cost, we talk about the capital costs of projects. And, you know, is this conductor more? Is that conductor more? When I think back to time at the RTO, when we would have a cold snap, because I was in New England, of 15 days, we could add a billion and a half dollars in 14 or 15 days of just energy costs that you could mitigate with more transmission capability. So when you really start to address the bottlenecks in the energy or the capacity market, you really start to create big savings for consumers. And you can do that quickly. speed to power again the moment that we need right now is not for the usual process I talked about process limitations we have a process the process takes 10 years or more grid reliability this is an SPP number but it's similar for MISO it's similar for PJM they're really big numbers and Again, I used an SVP example here, but significant gigawatts of generation sitting in each of the RTO's interconnection queues, and they're there because they need that headroom to connect to. The grid was built to only have as much as it needed. Building more was considered gold plating for the longest time. So there's not a huge amount of headroom to just plug new supply into. So I'm happy to take any questions on any of that or pull the thread on any of these things, and thank you for the interest and time and attention on this.

Sure. Chairman, do you mean in terms of supply chain time or the supply of the components?

No. So we manufacture globally. So we have five facilities around the globe. Our largest is in the U.S., which is where we're headquarters. Our supply chain for the U.S. is U.S. carbon fiber, U.S. fiberglass. So our supply chain is U.S.-based. And for projects, if we really needed to get something to a site, we could do that in as fast as 12 weeks. Usually people don't need their conductor that fast, but it is not going to be the limiting element in terms of time to delivery. Yes, sir.

Yes. Where are the appropriate applications? All of them? It's a great question. No, not all of them. I mean, for different reasons, all of them, but I'll get into that. If we're talking about doubling capacity or adding a lot of capacity, reducing losses, 345 or 400 kV if we're in Europe down is where the sweet spot lives for adding capacity. And that's because on transmission lines, as you put more power through it, you get things called corona and other limitations that mean that you don't want to put any more power through it. So when you get up to 500 and 765 kV voltages, you will have some benefits from just the structure of it, the light weight, the strength, lower towers, bigger spans, those sorts of benefits apply. But if we're talking about doubling power and those sorts of things, in the U.S. voltage is really 345 down, but then that could be 230, that could be 115, that could be 69. Distribution voltages as well. Our distribution voltages are actually transmission voltages in a lot of the countries that we work in as well. So it's used all the way down.

I mean it's the cost of losses so in that AEP example I think it was about $15 million a year. 30 megawatts of avoided.

Look they all got the stats 30 megawatts of avoided generation So it project dependent There a couple things when you think about the cost of it paying for itself If your comparison was do I reconductor or build a new line it will pay for itself as soon as you reconductor, because it's 75% less than building a new line. If your comparison was, I was going to tear everything down and build a taller, bigger line, then it's going to pay for itself because it's going to be cheaper than doing that as well. so if you're talking about actual capacity amps delivered then there's immediate payback because

need increased capacity, that's an additional factor.

If you're using the existing right-of-way, I mean, every time you have an incentive to put this line in, every time you had a factor, the return gets quicker. So each of those different phases, I mean, a 30% line loss seems like it ought to be, the return would be quick. and then you add the other things.

Can you have any more numbers to throw at us? Yeah, I mean, we're happy to, I think, do some cost-saving studies too. And I don't know if Caitlin or... But AEP doesn't own generation. Oh, you guys... So they're talking about some of the incentive alignment. So the thing is that if you are not vertically integrated to own all the generation, for example, or you don't own generation, you have different incentives. Do you care about your line losses? If you do own generation, for example, and somebody told you that you could run less of it, I'm not sure that you would be excited about that, right? So different incentives kick in depending on what your commercial structure is. And that's not to say that those are the motivating factors. necessarily, but it probably does go to whether people are excited and really focused on that particular element of payback from lost savings. Representative Peterson.

All the things that we talked about as to why that would be a good idea to see it would apply. So it's a good question. Thank you. Representative Matthews.

Was there some type of geographic or political environment that made that more likely? Or what explains that distribution? Yeah, it's an interesting... I'm going to take everybody back to that map so everyone gets the benefit One second Oop overshot So James can talk to this as well but I think what we seen is in some places there is a use case like, you know, we're really good. We can't get a right-of-way. This solves that problem. Or we really want to add capacity quickly. That solves that problem. And then what we find is that the utilities usually say, that's great, and we want to do that again. And so if we're thinking about Southern California Edison or Envy Energy or AEP Texas footprint, for example, I think a lot of that was the case. There was some sort of gateway moment of this is great, it really solved our problem. I think it will solve these other problems for us. And there probably is something to it. I mentioned I've been in the utility space not as long as James. It was 40 years, but 28 years. And you do what you know, and that's often great for reliability. It's safe. You don't want to change things quickly. So comfort is often a really big issue. Caitlin mentioned training for linemen. That's less of a thing in terms of a key sort of threshold issue because there's a lot more of the ACCC in the U.S. than there used to be. But until you have that training, you're like, oh, is that hard? Do I know how to, you know, is that, am I going to have an issue with that? You know, are the guys going to be safe working on this, the gals? And I think, you know, you go through it and you find out that the training is a few hours on an afternoon. I mean, we installed this in the middle of Africa. This is not, you know, you do not need to, like, reinvent the wheel here. It is not really difficult. But until you go through that process, that might create a barrier to entry. I think one of the other things that comes up, and this can be even within the same utility holding company with different footprints, is sometimes the different utilities have different standards groups. So this part of the utility will say, well, yeah, we deployed it, we tested it, we think it's great. And this part of the utility over here in this state is like, yeah, but we haven't done it yet. So even within that, there might be a reticence to sort of accept somebody else's work and say, okay, good, we're comfortable with that. But I do think, to your question, Representative, in many cases it was they had an experience with it, they started using it, and then they started using more of it. Representative Lawrence.

Can you comment on the life cycle or how long this infrastructure will last versus what we're currently seeing? Yeah, sure, absolutely. So for the ACSR or ACSS, the steel core and the ACCC, similar. I mean, people will say that's a 50-year asset or that's a 40-year asset. But you'll go out and you'll drive around and you'll find 70-year-old transmission lines or 80-year-old transmission lines out there all over the place. So these can last a long time. It's similar for that. There's a huge difference any time you start to get someplace where there are weather elements. So any place close to a coast or where there's seawater, this lasts several times longer than this because this has a reactive property between steel and aluminum. So you introduce salty air to that, and it starts to corrode quickly, and that doesn't happen with an advanced conductor. So you know if we by the Gulf Coast for example in Texas this will last far longer than this Committee any further questions Representative White

That is a great question. You know, I will just say that it's, and probably a great question for someone other than myself. I can look at these things and say, there's a lot of process in the utility world. You do things, you've got a five-year plan, you've got a 10-year plan, you're doing certain things. You've got aging infrastructure. Your process guide tells you to rip it down and build something new. And that's what you do until you have a new process directive to change that. So I think part of that is just the speed at which certain things change in North American utility space. And there are different structures, different incentives that can have impacts as well. But again, I'm probably not the right person to answer that question as to why a given utility is not doing a certain thing today.

Thank you very much. I very much enjoyed your presentation here, but looking over the map, there is one project you're showing in Ohio. Do you know geographically where that is?

Okay.

Seeing no other questions. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you all three of you. And they will be available afterwards for questions. Committee, while they were discussing, I sent out an image of page six of the report. And that, as you can see, it gives you a graphic of all the different advanced technologies. So Google and the team have talked about advanced conducting. We'd now like to talk about the other three, dynamic line rating, advanced paraflow control, transmission topology control. They are equally as impressive. Also, speaking of impressive, Mr. Cameron Ali of AEP Ohio. Welcome to committee, sir.

And I'm sorry, sir. Could you tell us, for the record, your position at AEP?

With that, open up for questions. Thank you, sir. Before I open to questions, would you have a quick review of advanced power flow control?

Yes, sir. How does that work?

Okay very good representative Raider There we go Thank you for being here so just so I understand kind of how we prioritize this the goal of our committee is to look out for affordability and reliability of our system I love that we have that kind of statement up front every time we have these discussions. But you started off pretty strong with how the problem of generation is really the kind of order of magnitude above the transmission issue. I just want to make sure I understand in your mind, Is that kind of how you see this? I know this is focused on transmission, but I want to get a sense for how that generation piece fits and kind of what is more important, what is more pressing, what is more sort of where we should be putting our time and energy as a committee?

That meant you need to build a lot more transmission. And that's what we ended up doing back in the 1970s, because that was the more cost-effective solution for our customers. Back then, the problem we were trying to solve is generation was more cost-effective to build on the Ohio River, because there was coal in West Virginia, Virginia, the river is right there, excellent location to site new power plants, and load was everywhere on our system. Today, the problem is very different. Generation is everywhere, and load is more central. I mean, most of the load we're signing up right now in Ohio is in Columbus, in New Albany and Dublin. And so the challenge is much different than what we had. Ideally, you know, if you build generation near load, you don't need a lot of transmission. If you build generation farther away from load, you're going to need a lot of transmission. And what we're dealing with today is, you know, and this is a question I think I had asked Representative Holmes, and he had an excellent answer that is electricity a commodity or is it a necessity I think that a fundamental question this committee needs to answer If it a commodity then you okay without it at some price point If it's a necessity, then you're not okay without it at any price point. And in that case, if it's a necessity, then it must be planned as a necessity where you look at generation and transmission together and you make sure you make the most cost-effective decisions for the customer by locating generation closer to where the load is so we don't end up building more transmission. Right now what we're doing is we're planning transmission in a silo and generation in a silo.

That's a loaded question. In essence, I think from a transmission perspective, you would argue that if the load shows up, which we are, again, very grateful for the Commission to have approved the data center tariff, which allows us to right-size the load and have the right mechanism in place to make sure it is going to be on the hook for the cost. If the load does show up and it is paying this fair share, you would argue that the transmission cost should be neutral or a net benefit to customers. The challenge is going to be around generation because, you know, if more generation gets built and if it is late in development, then you will see energy prices going up, we will see capacity prices going up, and, of course, everybody will be impacted by those prices.

Any further questions? All right, seeing none, thank you very much, sir.

Is there any other... Okay, any further questions from the committee?

appreciate your patience, but this, we're at the ground level and we're going to do this together. One last note before we leave. Next week, we had originally scheduled to have a meeting just like this with all the nuclear power companies and agencies coming in. As you know, we have a lot of generation coming in. Oclo is going to come in. Who else? We have Centris. Vistra Centris. Due to what we predict to be the extended session, we won't do that next week. We will have committee. we'll do some testimony for existing bills that we want to get moving, but probably when we come back that first meeting, if you could plan for that to have another technical discussion on nuclear power, and we'll get resources out for you on that to prepare for that. Is there any other business come before the committee today? Seeing none, the Energy House Committee is adjourned.