As electricity demand surges across the United States, a Johns Hopkins University initiative is helping states move faster—and more affordably—to expand grid capacity.
The project, known as Leadership in Grid Innovations for High-voltage Transmission for States (LIGHTS), recently received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Electricity through its Transmission Acceleration Grants program. This initiative supports decision-makers across the PJM Interconnection Region (PJM) in deploying alternative transmission technologies and grid enhancing technologies.
"The project addresses a very critical gap in moving cutting-edge research into practice," said Yury Dvorkin, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and civil and systems engineering and the project's primary investigator. "We're equipping decision-makers across PJM states with the expertise and analysis they need to expand transmission capacity rapidly, reduce the cost of electricity supply, and improve grid reliability."
PJM coordinates wholesale electricity markets across Maryland and 12 other states, plus the District of Columbia. The grids in many of these states, including Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, are facing rapid load growth, driven largely by the energy requirements of data centers.
The LIGHTS team is developing algorithms and models to help state governments determine where alternative transmission technologies and grid enhancing technologies could deliver the greatest benefits in terms of cost savings, reliability improvements, and speed. With support from the DOE, the researchers are working closely with state officials across PJM to ensure their modeling reflects real-world needs and constraints.
"We work with state officials to understand their specific problems, and so our work and analysis can be tailored to their needs to ensure our findings are real-world relevant," said Abe Silverman, an assistant research scholar with the Ralph O'Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI) and a co-PI with LIGHTS. "We don't have 10 years to wait for traditional transmission projects to happen. If we want to maintain reliability, keep costs down, and stay competitive in emerging industries like AI, we need solutions that can be deployed much faster."
Traditional transmission expansion typically involves building new high-voltage lines—a process that can take more than a decade because of permitting hurdles, land acquisition, and high construction costs.
LIGHTS focuses on identifying upgrades that can increase transmission capacity along existing lines, thereby reducing costs and speeding up implementation schedules. One such upgrade is the use of advanced conductors comprising modern materials, such as carbon fiber instead of aluminum steel. This change enables transmission lines to carry significantly more electricity than wires installed decades ago. By replacing aging conductors with higher-capacity versions, boost throughputs increased without the need to construct entirely new corridors.
Another upgrade is dynamic line ratings, which use real-time weather and system data to determine how much electricity a transmission line can safely carry. Conventional static ratings assume worse-case weather conditions and can underestimate available capacity.
"Instead of assuming the worst possible weather at all times, dynamic ratings update based on actual conditions," said Dvorkin, who is also a core researcher with ROSEI. "When capacity is higher, you improve efficiency. When it's lower, you improve reliability."
LIGHTS also draws on the Infrastructure Centric Adaptation and Resiliency in the U.S. (ICARUS), a ROSEI data initiative that compiles detailed transmission and capacity expansion data for the PJM region. Integrating ICARUS strengthens the rigor and transparency of the analysis, allowing the team to assess how targeted ATT deployments could relieve bottlenecks and potentially defer multibillion-dollar conventional transmission projects.
"This is not a theoretical exercise," Dvorkin said. "Our goal is to provide actionable insights that help states move faster, spend smarter, and strengthen reliability. If we use the grid we already have more intelligently, we can unlock enormous value in a fraction of the time it takes to build something new."
