"more than 90 percent of US utility transmission spending goes to lower-voltage, reliability-driven projects, often built outside of regional planning processes entirely" [90 percent]
The 90% figure directly quantifies how locally rational utility behavior aggregates into a systemically misallocated capital stock, providing concrete evidence for the signal's claim that fragmented incentive structures produce suboptimal grid topology.
Reasoning from this article
The article identifies a classic collective action problem: each utility optimizing for its own regulated return produces a grid that serves no one's long-term interest in renewable integration or AI infrastructure support. The same mechanism — locally rational actors producing systemically irrational outcomes — appears in interconnection queue dynamics (77% withdrawal rate), cross-seam transmission failures (Grain Belt Express, Plains & Eastern), and load interconnection chaos. This generalizes to any networked infrastructure sector where ownership fragmentation misaligns investment incentives with system-level needs.