This opinion piece from TWW’s Greg Brophy first ran in The Gazette on July 24, 2025 and can be accessed here.
The growing demand for more power
Just over six months since President Donald Trump took office for a second time, the American economy is roaring back to life. This means a surge in energy demand after years of stagnation or mild growth — and the U.S. power grid is barely keeping up.
This monumental shift is driven by several factors, including the return of manufacturing jobs from overseas and the intense race against China in artificial intelligence. Meet with any business leader or energy executive and they’ll tell you we need to build more power generation to have any hope of keeping the grid stable and the lights on.
But meeting this growing demand isn’t just about building more power plants — it’s also about dramatically expanding our power transmission infrastructure. You see, even if we generate enough electricity, it’s useless if we can’t get it to where it’s needed. Think of it like a highway system for energy: you can have all the factories in the world, but without roads to move the goods, your product will never reach its customers.
The reality is, our existing transmission lines are aging. They’re barely keeping up with current levels of demand and won’t be able to cope with the new era of growth we’re entering.
Therefore, to truly support America’s economic resurgence and maintain grid stability at the same time, we need to invest heavily in building new, robust transmission lines that can efficiently and reliably deliver power from where it’s produced to homes, businesses and factories across the nation. Without this critical infrastructure, the benefits of new power generation will be severely limited, and the grid will remain vulnerable to strain and disruption.
The sheer scale of this transmission challenge is staggering, and it’s a regional issue, not just a local one. Here in Colorado, for instance, the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority estimates that we’ll need between $4.5 billion and $8 billion in investments and an upgrade of 3,700 miles of power lines to handle the surging demand.
Meanwhile, the Western Electricity Coordinating Council — the organization responsible for ensuring a stable electricity supply across 14 Western states and two Canadian provinces — is sounding alarm bells.
Over the next decade, electricity demand on the Western grid is expected to increase by more than 20% — effectively double the rate that was predicted just a few years ago. Therefore, more transmission capacity is needed to move electricity between regions of the Western grid “when one has a shortfall and the other has sufficient available energy to meet that shortfall,” the Western Electricity Coordinating Council noted in a 2024 system adequacy report.
“The ability to transfer power between regions could be a key to maintaining reliability,” the Western grid operators warned.
To be sure, Colorado is making progress to strengthen its energy backbone. A prime example is the newly opened Burlington-Lamar transmission line, a vital 112-mile, 230-kilovolt line in southeast Colorado.
This new line, along with upgrades to the Burlington and Lamar substations, significantly enhances reliability and resilience for rural electric cooperatives in the Tri-State Generation and Transmission system. It also opens the door for connecting over 700 megawatts of additional generation — a textbook case of how the nation needs power lines and power plants to meet the demands of a growing economy.
Beyond immediate upgrades, ambitious projects are also on the horizon. The proposed Three Corners Connector — also in southeast Colorado — is a transformative 300-mile, 525-kV high-voltage transmission line.
The $2 billion project would link existing electric infrastructure near Pueblo with the Oklahoma Panhandle, forging a crucial connection between the U.S. western and eastern electric grids. Besides increased reliability, the Three Corners Connector will unlock new markets for power producers in Colorado and Oklahoma.
As anyone from the Eastern plains of Colorado can attest, the business of generating electricity has become increasingly important to farmers, ranchers and rural communities. It’s a growing source of revenue — a new cash crop, if you will — but it depends on transmission lines that connect the rural communities where energy is produced to the urban areas where most of the nation’s energy is consumed.
For years, a bipartisan consensus has been building in Washington, D.C., that we need to speed up the permitting times for major transmission line projects. But rising to this challenge will also require state and local leaders to fully engage as well, not just in their own communities, but across jurisdictional lines.
This isn’t just about keeping the lights on — it’s about cementing America’s role as the world’s leading economy and being the world’s dominant energy producer well into the 21st century. That’s a goal we should be able to get behind.
Greg Brophy is a farmer and former state senator from Wray.