Google and CTC Global collaborate to build faster, smarter transmission systems to meet AI-driven power demands.
The partnership focuses on deploying advanced conductors to increase power line capacity without new infrastructure.
This move highlights Big Tech’s proactive role in addressing energy infrastructure challenges globally.
Now you have large electricity users saying, ‘please let me pay for it.’ What they can’t buy is a time machine. So if you tell them it’s ten years away and they need it in two, they’re really looking for how they can contribute to this.
Big Tech used to wait for the grid to catch up. Now, it’s writing the checks to fix it. Faced with historic demand from AI and nowhere to plug in, Google is partnering with CTC Global to do what utilities and regulators have not. It is building faster, smarter transmission to power the future on its own terms.
Theodore Paradise, Chief Policy and Grid Strategy Officer at CTC Global, has 15 years of experience in regional transmission organizations. Today, he’s helping redefine what it means for large electricity users to take control of infrastructure in what he calls an “age of Big Tech taking control of their destiny.”
Check, please: “For the longest time, the cost allocation argument for transmission was everybody saying, ‘I don’t want to pay for it,’” Paradise says. “Now you have large electricity users saying, ‘please let me pay for it.’ What they can’t buy is a time machine. So if you tell them it’s ten years away and they need it in two, they’re really looking for how they can contribute to this.”
Growth spurt: That shift comes as power demand surges. “Electrification has been a big issue for a while,” Paradise says. “But now we have AI data centers, which have supercharged that demand. It’s like a plant that was already doing well suddenly getting a load of fertilizer—it’s growing at a massive rate.”
But the industry isn’t built for this kind of growth. “Normalcy bias is a really strong thing,” Paradise says. “We always think we’ve always had enough wires, we’ve always had enough generation, these things work themselves out.”
We have all this electricity ready to go—megawatts from new power projects just waiting to serve demand—but they’re stuck. They’re on the wrong side of a gap in the grid. There just aren’t enough wires to deliver the power where it’s needed.
Supply, meet demand: In theory, supply should be able to keep up. “We have over two and a half terawatts of generation waiting to interconnect,” he notes. “That is a ton.” But there’s a disconnect. “We have all this electricity ready to go—megawatts from new power projects just waiting to serve demand—but they’re stuck,” Paradise says. “They’re on the wrong side of a gap in the grid. There just aren’t enough wires to deliver the power where it’s needed.”
Watt’s the holdup: This is where the CTC and Google partnership comes in. Faced with soaring energy needs, Google is no longer waiting for the grid to catch up. It is helping build it. The company is funding deployment of advanced conductors that double the capacity of existing power lines using the poles already in place. “We could do this in 12, 14 months,” Paradise says. “And we can really start to unlock all of this generation.”
Current necessity: Transmission is no longer a luxury. “It has become an essential in modern economies, like water,” Paradise says. Ensuring access is not just about lowering bills or powering data centers; it’s about unlocking opportunity at every level.
“I’m excited about this for Africa. I’m excited about this for Bangladesh and India. I’m excited about this for emerging economies,” he says. “If we’re moving from the Industrial Revolution to a digital AI revolution, those are economies that will also just be left behind in so many ways if they don’t have access. So I see this as transformative for the first world, certainly, but transformative for the world in general.”
