The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)’s latest Energy Infrastructure Report Card publication rates the US power grid at a D+, down from the 2021 rating of C-. This decline is attributed less to a degradation of the power grid, and more to the rapid expansion of data centers among other load types – a challenge which the nation’s transmission infrastructure simply isn’t rising to meet. Transmission investments rose by $5 billion from 2017 to 2022, to $25 billion, then by over 10% to $27.7 billion in 2023. That may seem like a high growth rate, but it’s from a low base. To get a grasp of what the US ‘should’ be spending, we might take its rival China as…