One of the primary threats to the clean energy buildout spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act is a lack of transmission. Models show that hitting our Paris climate targets would involve building two to three times our current transmission capacity, yet new lines are desperately slow to come online. Meanwhile, existing lines are congested and hundreds of gigawatts of new clean energy sits waiting in interconnection queues.Wouldn’t it be cool if there were some relatively cheap and speedy ways to get more capacity out of the transmission infrastructure we’ve already built? To ease some of that congestion and get more clean energy online while we wait for new lines to be completed?As it happens, there are. They are called grid-enhancing technologies, or GETs, and they can improve the performance of existing transmission lines by as much as 40 percent. It’s just that, in the US at least, utilities aren’t deploying them. They’ve been tested and deployed all over the world, but the US system has resisted using them at scale. I contacted Julia Selker, head of the Working for Advanced Transmission Technologies (WATT) Coalition, a GETs trade group, to discuss exactly what these technologies are, their enormous potential to ease grid congestion, why utilities still resist them, and what kinds of policies can help move them along. Get full access to Volts at www.volts.wtf/subscribe