Despite an increase in spending on electricity transmission, the number of outages due to transmission problems has climbed by more than 10 percentage points over the last nine years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers in its latest “Failure to Act” report, focused on the U.S. electric grid.
Transmission spending rose from $15.6 billion in 2012 to $22.2 billion in 2018; at the same time, transmission disruptions caused 46% of the outages in 2019, up from 32% in 2011.