Substation Scout - The What and the Why

• What: SubstationScout aims to make it easier for the energy and real estate development communities to gather info about our grid and speed up their path to energizing new stuff. The roadmap shows what I'm working on toward that end.
• Why: The info these Site Selection folks need is currently fragmented, scattered, and nuanced. This is holding us back as a nation.

---

A Foreword from Phil, the creator of SubstationScout

Back in the ancient days of the 2010s, Site Selection folks like me thought we had it real tough. We had to make our data center developer clients fill out a "Load Letter" for the utility. Oh, the tyranny!

Nowadays, developers are putting up millions of dollars just for the privilege of a bona fide position in the queue.

Poor developers? No. Poor society.

We are seriously short on energy and we need to move fast.

The framing of this issue is often unfortunate, because the focus always seems to be the bagoogles of money that's available for investing and the gigawatts of energy needed to power all the memes. The language is uncompelling to the average consumer, I think. These aggregate values make for clickable headlines but not for common discourse.

One idea would be to ground the conversation in more relatable terms, such as in years. When I interned in the engineering department of the NJ Turnpike Authority in the early aughts, I was shocked to learn that virtually all of the bridges on the roadway were designed for 50 years — and that they were exactly 50 years old! This stat was easily more meaningful than some massive budget number for capital improvements used as justification to raise tolls.

Well, like my overtrafficked home state, our energy infrastructure is in a more precarious position than the average consumer probably realizes:

• About 70% of U.S. transmission lines are more than 25 years old, 70% of large power transformers are over 25 years old, and 60% of circuit breakers have been in service for more than 30 years. US DOE
• Roughly 55% of the estimated 60–80 million in-service distribution transformers are more than 33 years old and approaching the end of their expected service life. US DOE
• The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) graded U.S. energy infrastructure a D+ in its 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure (down from a C- in 2021), citing aging assets, rising demand, and modernization challenges. ASCE

Folks, you can't score a D+ and expect to compete with the Chinese.

Our decades of underinvestment represent a complacency we have allowed due to our leading-economy status in the world. Fast forward to today and large new energy users are routinely resisted by members of the public and are measuring their time-to-power in — you guessed it — years.

It seems many of us have lost the healthy sense of fear that other economies will not just outgrow ours (which is inevitable), but will dominate ours.

The discussion about American competitiveness and the energy discussion are inseparable. Energy is the air that industry and progress breathe. In our new world, this is truer than ever before. Electricity has become a strategic input into computing, manufacturing, transportation and virtually every other growth industry.

The choice is clear: add large amounts of reliable power quickly, or fall behind.

Finding our bay

American exceptionalism will always involve some friction between exuberance from the business side and deliberateness from the engineering side. We see this play out at every scale: when a salesperson talks up a feature that's still just on the roadmap, and the engineers cringe; when business visionaries promise fleets of driverless cars "next year," and one of the prototypes crashes because of sun glare.

That friction is normal and healthy. But when it takes years just to establish whether and where a project can be energized, it starts to exacerbate a much bigger problem.

In our race against China, it should not be lost on us that China has a one-party authoritarian government. That centralization is an operational advantage when it comes to building big things fast.

America is different. Our historic emphasis on local control has led to a wonderful diversity of thought in our nation and helped us be more creative than our competitors. We shouldn't give that up. We should get better at making our system work.

That means getting better at the parts of the system that are ours to fix — the ones sitting in a filing cabinet at a regional grid operator, the fifty different interconnection queues, the thousands of local permitting authorities.

SubstationScout starts from a modest premise: before we can fix the physical constraints, we should at least make the information legible.

Where are the substations? What's happening in the interconnection queues? What are utilities telling regulators about capacity and investment? What can we learn from thousands of filings that today are technically public but practically inaccessible?

Better information helps people make better decisions about what to build, and where to build it.

So instead of dreaming of a world where America resists Asia's rise with protectionism, let's envision a world where a colorful America is undeterred by the economic might of others because she continues to create virtually every new thing that matters, and can thus command her own price.

Energy gets us there.