The cheapest gigawatt in America right now is the one already strung between two towers.
The Energy Department announced selections on Thursday under SPARK, its program for Speed to Power through Accelerated Reconductoring and other Key Advanced Transmission Technology Upgrades, run out of the Office of Electricity and funded through GRIP. The headline numbers: $1.9 billion federal, $3.35 billion in recipient cost share, $5.25 billion total, 31 projects, 26 states. More than 1,500 miles of line get reconductored or rebuilt. Grid-enhancing technologies go onto nearly 21,000 miles of existing line.
DOE puts the resulting capacity gain at 23 gigawatts.
Reconductoring is a construction program, not a technology program
Replacing conductor on existing structures avoids the two things that kill new transmission: siting and interconnection queue time. It does not avoid construction. Advanced conductors carry more current at the same or lower sag, which frequently means checking and reinforcing structures that were designed for a lighter wire decades ago, and it means outages on lines that the system is currently relying on.
That is line crew work, foundation work, structure replacement and a lot of outage coordination, spread across 26 states and a number of utilities that do not currently have the crews. The workforce constraint in high-voltage line work is at least as tight as it is in the electrical trades generally, and 1,500 miles of reconductoring plus 21,000 miles of device installation lands on the same labor pool.
What “selected” means
These are selections for award negotiation. DOE selections routinely change scope, shed partners or fall out before funds obligate, and the correct verb until a negotiated award is signed is “selected for,” not “awarded.” The $3.35 billion in cost share is committed on paper and not yet spent. The 23 gigawatts and the roughly 100 million Americans DOE says will benefit are agency projections, produced by the agency funding the work.
Individual project figures reported so far include a $1.2 billion Colorado Energy Office project expanding interregional transfer capability across Colorado, Texas and neighboring regions, and an $832 million Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services project, the Three Corners Connection, linking the Southwest Power Pool to the Western Electricity Coordinating Council. The largest single utility award reported is PPL Electric Utilities at up to $71.5 million for 29.3 miles in Pennsylvania. Alabama Power, Duke Energy Carolinas, Eversource Energy and Kit Carson Electric Cooperative also appear on the selection list. Those per-project numbers come from the selection list as reported rather than from the DOE release itself, which does not break recipients out.
Why the timing matters
Load growth from data centers has pushed every utility in the country into the same question: how do you move more power before 2030 when a new line takes a decade. Reconductoring is the only answer that fits inside that window, and Thursday’s announcement is the federal government buying it at scale rather than piloting it.
The projects that get built will be the ones where the utility already has the crews and the outage plan. The rest will find out what a 2027 line construction market costs.
Source: U.S. Department of Energy, 2026-09-24.