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After groundbreaking bills on jobs and solar, Illinois tackles the grid

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Monday, March 3, 2025

Since 2017, sweeping legislation in Illinois has sparked a solar-power boom and launched ambitious energy-equity and green-jobs programs. Now, for the third time in under a decade, state lawmakers, advocates, and industry groups have their sights set on ensuring that clean energy momentum. The focus this legislative session is the electric grid. Stakeholders worry the state’s clean energy progress will stagnate if it can’t expand and fortify its infrastructure for moving and storing electricity. Advocates are backing a wide-ranging bill known as the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, or CRGA, which they describe as the successor to the 2017 Future Energy Jobs Act and the 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act. Solar and energy-storage industries are backing another bill that includes even more ambitious goals for building out new transmission and energy storage. There’s widespread agreement that Illinois’ current grid is not ready for the state’s mandated transition to 100% clean energy by 2050, especially as overall electricity demand climbs thanks to the proliferation of data centers in Illinois. As in other states, Illinois’ long interconnection queues and lengthy transmission planning processes through the regional transmission organizations make it hard to connect renewable energy sources. CRGA, introduced Feb. 7, aims to make more efficient use of existing grid infrastructure through a transparent audit of the current system and the adoption of grid-enhancing technologies. It would facilitate new transmission buildout by making it easier for merchant transmission developers to get state permits and by allowing high-voltage transmission lines to be built in highway rights-of-way. It also calls for 3 gigawatts of new energy storage to be added to the grid. “Transmission is crucial to a reliable and affordable grid because it allows us to move clean energy from place to place and be more resilient in cases of extreme weather,” said James Gignac, Midwest policy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate and energy program. The industry-backed transmission and storage bill (HB 3758), introduced Feb. 7, calls for 15 GW of new energy storage, which the bill’s backers say would save consumers $2.4 billion over 20 years. The bill calls on the Illinois Power Agency, which procures energy for the state’s utilities, to also procure energy storage. Gignac said studies by advocacy groups indicate 3 GW of storage is sufficient for the near-term. Both industry and advocacy groups backed a “skinny bill” that passed in the legislature’s January lame-duck session, launching an analysis of energy storage needs by the Illinois Commerce Commission, due on May 1. Stakeholders generally agree that new energy legislation is especially crucial given the Trump administration’s rollbacks to clean energy incentives and mandates. “A lot of federal funding we just don’t know the future of, so the role of states and local governments is more important than ever now,” said Jen Walling, executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council. Study first Illinois does not do the type of comprehensive planning for energy use and transmission that electric utilities do in states with vertically integrated energy markets. In Illinois, separate companies generate and transmit electricity, with the idea that the open market will match supply with demand. But experts say centralized planning is necessary to ensure that clean energy can meet the state’s needs. “The market is not necessarily going to get us where we need to go on resource adequacy and reliability,” said John Delurey, Midwest deputy program director of the advocacy group Vote Solar. CRGA calls on the state to undertake a clean-resource planning process involving the commerce commission, state Environmental Protection Agency, and Illinois Power Agency, similar to what utilities in other states do with integrated resource plans. The bill also mandates public studies of the grid to determine where it is underutilized and how the latest technology could more efficiently move electrons around — increasing the grid’s capacity without building new wires. “A lot of incumbent transmission owners have confidence in their traditional approaches and tend to rely on those” instead of adopting new grid-enhancing technology, said Gignac. As an example, he pointed to software that can help grid operators reroute power through less congested pathways, a tool reminiscent of Google Maps for road traffic. “There’s potentially a financial disincentive for [companies to embrace] some of these technologies,” Gignac added, “because they can often be cheaper solutions” than building new transmission, which earns companies a guaranteed profit from ratepayers. Clean energy advocates say more transmission lines are needed, but they want a comprehensive study to know exactly where and how much.

Since 2017, sweeping legislation in Illinois has sparked a solar-power boom and launched ambitious energy-equity and green-jobs programs.

Now, for the third time in under a decade, state lawmakers, advocates, and industry groups have their sights set on ensuring that clean energy momentum.

The focus this legislative session is the electric grid. Stakeholders worry the state’s clean energy progress will stagnate if it can’t expand and fortify its infrastructure for moving and storing electricity.

Advocates are backing a wide-ranging bill known as the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, or CRGA, which they describe as the successor to the 2017 Future Energy Jobs Act and the 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act. Solar and energy-storage industries are backing another bill that includes even more ambitious goals for building out new transmission and energy storage.

There’s widespread agreement that Illinois’ current grid is not ready for the state’s mandated transition to 100% clean energy by 2050, especially as overall electricity demand climbs thanks to the proliferation of data centers in Illinois. As in other states, Illinois’ long interconnection queues and lengthy transmission planning processes through the regional transmission organizations make it hard to connect renewable energy sources.

CRGA, introduced Feb. 7, aims to make more efficient use of existing grid infrastructure through a transparent audit of the current system and the adoption of grid-enhancing technologies. It would facilitate new transmission buildout by making it easier for merchant transmission developers to get state permits and by allowing high-voltage transmission lines to be built in highway rights-of-way. It also calls for 3 gigawatts of new energy storage to be added to the grid.

“Transmission is crucial to a reliable and affordable grid because it allows us to move clean energy from place to place and be more resilient in cases of extreme weather,” said James Gignac, Midwest policy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate and energy program.

The industry-backed transmission and storage bill (HB 3758), introduced Feb. 7, calls for 15 GW of new energy storage, which the bill’s backers say would save consumers $2.4 billion over 20 years. The bill calls on the Illinois Power Agency, which procures energy for the state’s utilities, to also procure energy storage. Gignac said studies by advocacy groups indicate 3 GW of storage is sufficient for the near-term. Both industry and advocacy groups backed a “skinny bill” that passed in the legislature’s January lame-duck session, launching an analysis of energy storage needs by the Illinois Commerce Commission, due on May 1.

Stakeholders generally agree that new energy legislation is especially crucial given the Trump administration’s rollbacks to clean energy incentives and mandates.

“A lot of federal funding we just don’t know the future of, so the role of states and local governments is more important than ever now,” said Jen Walling, executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council.

Study first

Illinois does not do the type of comprehensive planning for energy use and transmission that electric utilities do in states with vertically integrated energy markets. In Illinois, separate companies generate and transmit electricity, with the idea that the open market will match supply with demand. But experts say centralized planning is necessary to ensure that clean energy can meet the state’s needs.

“The market is not necessarily going to get us where we need to go on resource adequacy and reliability,” said John Delurey, Midwest deputy program director of the advocacy group Vote Solar.

CRGA calls on the state to undertake a clean-resource planning process involving the commerce commission, state Environmental Protection Agency, and Illinois Power Agency, similar to what utilities in other states do with integrated resource plans.

The bill also mandates public studies of the grid to determine where it is underutilized and how the latest technology could more efficiently move electrons around — increasing the grid’s capacity without building new wires.

“A lot of incumbent transmission owners have confidence in their traditional approaches and tend to rely on those” instead of adopting new grid-enhancing technology, said Gignac. As an example, he pointed to software that can help grid operators reroute power through less congested pathways, a tool reminiscent of Google Maps for road traffic.

“There’s potentially a financial disincentive for [companies to embrace] some of these technologies,” Gignac added, “because they can often be cheaper solutions” than building new transmission, which earns companies a guaranteed profit from ratepayers. Clean energy advocates say more transmission lines are needed, but they want a comprehensive study to know exactly where and how much.

Read the full story here.

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Gas and oil industry cautiously welcomes government proposals that could ease tax burden on sectorThe UK government has pledged to “unleash the North Sea’s clean energy future”, as it confirmed plans to ban new drilling licences but also unveiled proposals that could ease the tax burden on the oil and gas sector.The “windfall” tax on North Sea drillers, introduced in 2022 to help support households facing rising energy bills after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, would be scrapped from 2030, the Treasury confirmed on Wednesday. Continue reading...

The UK government has pledged to “unleash the North Sea’s clean energy future”, as it confirmed plans to ban new drilling licences but also unveiled proposals that could ease the tax burden on the oil and gas sector.The “windfall” tax on North Sea drillers, introduced in 2022 to help support households facing rising energy bills after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, would be scrapped from 2030, the Treasury confirmed on Wednesday.In its place, ministers will consult on a new regime, under which duties move in tandem with global wholesale energy prices, something the industry said would provide its investors with “certainty”.Alongside the tax plans, the government announced an eight-week consultation on how to manage the North Sea’s transition from oil and gas to cleaner forms of energy, without triggering mass job losses.The proposals follow through on Labour’s manifesto commitment not to permit any new drilling licences.The GMB and Unite trade unions have opposed the measure, warning of a repeat of the devastation visited on coalmining communities if no plan is put in place to protect workers.Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said the consultation would avert job losses in the North Sea oil industry during the transition to hydrogen, renewable energy and technologies such as carbon capture and storage.“The North Sea will be at the heart of Britain’s energy future,” Miliband said. “For decades, its workers, businesses and communities have helped power our country and our world.“Oil and gas production will continue to play an important role and, as the world embraces the drive to clean energy, the North Sea can power our plan for change and clean energy future in the decades ahead.”Extensions on the life of existing drilling licences would not be affected, ensuring that oil fields could “operate for the entirety of their lifetime”, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said.The government also said that developers would be able to resume applying for consents for already licensed projects, as a result of “revised” environmental guidance on offshore projects.This follows a supreme court ruling last year that requires regulators to consider the impact of burning oil and gas in environmental assessments of new projects.The oil industry issued a cautious welcome to the government’s blueprint for reforming taxation.North Sea drillers currently pay a 40% tax on their profits, as well as the 38% energy profits levy brought in by the previous government in response to energy companies recording bumper profits as oil and gas prices surged in response to war in Ukraine.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionUnder proposals that would come in from 2030, tax rates would be more closely linked to changing wholesale prices. That mechanism would mean the tax rate would rise if wholesale prices also jumped sharply due to an oil and gas price shock.The trade body Offshore Energies UK (OEUK) welcomed plans it said would protect jobs and allay investors’ concerns about a volatile tax regime.David Whitehouse, the chief executive of OEUK, said a sliding-scale tax regime would “help to begin to give certainty to investors and create a stable investment environment for years to come”.Greenpeace welcomed the “reaffirmation of the government’s world-leading commitment to end our reliance on North Sea oil and gas”.Mel Evans, climate team leader at Greenpeace UK, said: “Our over-reliance on volatile and expensive fossil fuels is the reason our energy bills have remained so high in recent years.“The government clearly recognises that creating a renewable energy system can provide this country and its energy workers with economic opportunities and stable, future-proofed jobs.”

Energy

Government

Climate

Power struggle: will Brazil’s booming datacentre industry leave ordinary people in the dark?

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Thirty-six hours by boat from Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, Deodato Alves da Silva longs for enough electricity to keep his tucumã and cupuaçu fruits fresh. These highly nutritious Amazonian superfoods are rich in antioxidants and vitamins, and serve as a main source of income for farmers in Silva’s area. However, the lack of electricity to refrigerate the fruit makes it hard to sell their produce.Silva’s fruit-growing operation is located in the village of Boa Frente, in Novo Aripuanã municipality, one of Brazil’s most energy-poor regions, where there is only one diesel-powered electricity generator working for a few hours a day.The 17 families in the community pay for the diesel, but because of the high price, everyone agrees to use the generator only between 6pm and 10pm. This is also the only time they can communicate with the outside world – the region has no mobile phone connection, only satellite internet.“Power is supplied for just four hours a night. 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We may have real-estate speculation, with land becoming more expensive and families being displaced.” Oliveira also anticipates greater demand for water, as datacentres generally require vast amounts to cool servers.Osório windfarm in Rio Grande do Sul. Brazil has one of the world’s cleanest electricity grids but demand is rising so fast that small nuclear reactors are now being considered. Photograph: Alamy“By using cooling systems with excessive water use, these companies consume more than small cities,” he says, stressing that better infrastructure for distribution and power generation will also be required.“This level of investment may affect energy rates,” he adds. “In the end, the consumers bear the cost.”skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Global DispatchGet a different world view with a roundup of the best news, features and pictures, curated by our global development teamPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionIf they are going to build datacentres where people don’t even have access to power, the companies need to provide compensationAccording to last year’s National Energy Balance report, the industry consumes about 31% of Brazil’s energy, second only to transport. Projections suggest Brazil’s electricity demand will grow by more than 30% by 2050.Experts fear that datacentres’ high water consumption will raise pressure on the power grid, as hydroelectric plants supply about half of all power. Lower water levels in reservoirs raise the chances of blackouts and increase demand for pricier and more polluting thermal power plants, fired by oil, gas and coal.Incidents such as the 2001 water crisis, which caused rationing, and the severe 2014-15 drought, when reservoirs reached record lows, show how a lack of rainfall can threaten the national power supply.Itajá in Goiás during a blackout last year. Demand for electricity in Brazil is predicted to grow by more than 30% by 2050. Photograph: Vinicius Souza/AlamyYet the energy ministry remains optimistic. In a statement, it said: “The growth of the datacentre sector in Brazil shows the country’s capacity to become a technological hub in South America, driven by a robust and predominantly renewable power grid.”By 2026, global datacentre power demand is projected to reach up to 1,050 terawatt-hours – equivalent to about four times the UK’s annual electricity consumption. 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A study using the Multidimensional Energy Poverty Index indicated that 11% of Brazilian households lived in energy poverty in 2018 – a percentage rising to 16% in rural areas.Elaine Santos. ‘People lose food and medication,’ she says. ‘The shortages create tension’Even in São Paulo, the country’s largest metropolis, residents face increasingly frequent blackouts. Elaine Santos, a researcher in energy poverty at the University of São Paulo, faces the problem herself, as she lives in Santo André, a suburb of the city.“People lose food and their medication; the bakery closes,” she says of the power cuts. “The shortages create tension, as everyone knows they will have to cope with their losses alone in neighbourhoods where people live in extremely vulnerable conditions.”Santos believes the tech companies must look at the local effects caused by their growing share of the country’s power supply.“If they are going to build datacentres where people don’t even have access to power, the companies need to provide compensation,” she argues. “Since Brazil is being sold, the compensation must be robust.”

Energy

Food

Conservation

How the British Broke Their Own Economy

With the best intentions, the United Kingdom engineered a housing and energy shortage.

What’s the matter with the United Kingdom? Great Britain is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, which ushered in an era of energy super-production and launched an epoch of productivity advancements that made many life essentials, such as clothes and food, more affordable. Today, the country suffers from the converse of these achievements: a profound energy shortage and a deep affordability crisis. In February, the Bank of England reported an ongoing productivity slump so mysterious that its own economists “cannot account fully” for it. Real wages have barely grown for 16 years. British politics seems stuck in a cycle of disappointment followed by dramatic promises of growth, followed by yet more disappointment.A new report, titled “Foundations,” captures the country’s economic malaise in detail. The U.K. desperately needs more houses, more energy, and more transportation infrastructure. “No system can be fixed by people who do not know why it is broken,” write the report’s authors, Sam Bowman, Samuel Hughes, and Ben Southwood. They argue that the source of the country’s woes as well as “the most important economic fact about modern Britain [is] that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere.” The nation is gripped by laws and customs that make essentials unacceptably scarce and drive up the cost of construction across the board.Housing is an especially alarming case in point. The homeownership rate for the typical British worker aged 25 to 34 declined by more than half from the 1990s to the 2010s. In that same time, average housing prices more than doubled, even after adjusting for inflation, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.[Read: How the U.K. became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe]The housing shortage traces back to the postwar period, when a frenzy of nationalization swept the country. The U.K. created the National Health Service, brought hundreds of coal mines under state control, and centralized many of the country’s railways and trucking and electricity providers. In 1947, the U.K. passed the Town and Country Planning Act, which forms the basis of modern housing policy. The TCPA effectively prohibited new development without special permission from the state; “green belts” were established to restrict sprawl into the countryside. Rates of private-home building never returned to their typical prewar levels. With some spikes and troughs, new homes built as a share of the total housing stock have generally declined over the past 60 years.The TCPA was considered reasonable and even wise at the time. Postwar Britain had been swept up by the theory that nationalization created economies of scale that gave citizens better outcomes than pure capitalism. “There was an idea that if we could rationalize the planning system … then we could build things in the right way—considered, and planned, and environmentally friendly,” Bowman told me.But the costs of nationalization became clear within a few decades. With more choke points for permitting, construction languished from the 1950s through the ’70s. Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives rolled back nationalization in several areas, such as electricity and gas production. But their efforts to loosen housing policy from the grip of government control was a tremendous failure, especially once it was revealed that Thatcher’s head of housing policy himself opposed new housing developments near his home.Housing is, as I’ve written, the quantum field of urban policy, touching every station of urban life. Broken housing policies have a ripple effect. In London, Bowman said, the most common options are subsidized flats for the low-income and luxury units for the rich, creating a dearth of middle-class housing. As a result, the city is bifurcated between the über-wealthy and the subsidized poor. “I think housing policy is a major driver of a lot of anti-foreigner, white-supremacist, anti-Black, anti-Muslim attitudes among young people who are frustrated that so-called these people get free houses while they have to live in a bedsit or move somewhere an hour outside the city and commute in,” Bowman said.[Read: The urban family exodus is a warning for progressives]Constrictive housing policy in Britain has also arguably prevented other great cities from being born. If the University of Cambridge’s breakthroughs in biotech had happened in the 19th century, Bowman said, the city of Cambridge might have bloomed to accommodate new companies and residents, the same way Glasgow grew by an order of magnitude around shipbuilding in the 1800s. Instead Cambridge remains a small city of fewer than 150,000 people, its potential stymied by rules all but prohibiting its growth.The story for transit and energy is similar: Rules and attitudes that make it difficult to build things in the world have made life worse for the British. “On a per-mile basis, Britain now faces some of the highest railway costs in the world,” Bowman, Hughes, and Southwood write. “This has led to some profoundly dissatisfying outcomes. Leeds is now the largest city in Europe without a metro system.” Despite Thatcher’s embrace of North Sea gas, and more recent attempts to loosen fracking regulations, Britain’s energy markets are still an omnishambles. Per capita electricity generation in the U.K. is now roughly one-third that of the United States, and energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7. By these measures, at least, Britain may be the most energy-starved nation in the developed world.Scarcity is a policy choice. This is as true in energy as it is in housing. In the 1960s, Britain was home to about half of the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors. Today, the U.K. has extraordinarily high nuclear-construction costs compared with Asia, and it’s behind much of Europe in the share of its electricity generated from nuclear power—not only France but also Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Romania.What happened to British nuclear power? After North Sea oil and gas production ramped up in the 1970s and ’80s, Britain redirected its energy production away from nuclear power. Even this shift has had its own complications. In the past few years, the U.K. has passed several measures to reduce shale-gas extraction, citing earthquake risks, environmental costs, and public opposition. As a result, gas production in the U.K. has declined 70 percent since 2000. Although the country’s renewable-energy market has grown, solar and wind power haven’t increased nearly enough to make up the gap.The comparison with France makes clear Britain’s policy error: In 2003, very large businesses in both countries paid about the same price for electricity. But by 2024, after decades of self-imposed scarcity and the supply shock of the war in Ukraine, electricity in the U.K. was more than twice as expensive as in France.There is an inconvenient subcurrent to the U.K.’s scarcity crisis—and ours. Sixty years ago, the environmentalist revolution transformed the way governments, courts, and individuals thought about their relationship to the natural world. This revolution was not only successful but, in many ways, enormously beneficial. In the U.S., the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act brought about exactly that. But over time, American environmental rules, such as those in the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, have been used to stop new housing developments and, ironically, even clean-energy additions. Similarly, in the U.K., any individual who sues to stop a new project on environmental grounds—say, to oppose a new road or airport—generally has their legal damages capped at £5,000, if they lose in court. “Once you’ve done that,” Bowman said, “you’ve created a one-way system, where people have little incentive to not bring spurious cases to challenge any new development.” Last year, Britain’s high-speed-rail initiative was compelled to spend an additional £100 million on a shield to protect bats in the woods of Buckinghamshire. Finding private investment is generally difficult for infrastructure developers when the path to completion is strewn with nine-figure surprise fees.Some of Britain’s problems echo across the European continent, including slow growth and high energy prices. More than a decade ago, Germany began to phase out nuclear power while failing to ramp up other energy production. The result has been catastrophic for citizens and for the ruling government. In the first half of 2024, Germans paid the highest electricity prices in the European Union. This month, Social Democrats were punished at the polls with their worst defeat since World War II. Bowman offered a droll summary: “Europe has an energy problem; the Anglosphere has a housing problem; Britain has both.”These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth. “Few leaders in the U.K. have thought seriously about the scale of change that we need,” Bowman said. Comprehensive reform is necessary to unlock private investment in housing and energy—including overhauling the TCPA, reducing incentives for anti-growth lawsuits, and directly encouraging nuclear and gas production to build a bridge to a low-carbon-energy economy.Effective 21st-century governance requires something more than the ability to win elections by decrying the establishment and bemoaning sclerotic institutions. Progress requires a positive vision of the future, a deep understanding of the bottlenecks in the way of building that future, and a plan to add or remove policies to overcome those blockages. In a U.S. context, that might mean making it easier to build advanced semiconductors, or removing bureaucratic kludge for scientists while adding staff at the FDA to accelerate drug approval.[Read: A simple plan to solve all of America’s problems]In the U.K., the bottlenecks are all too clear: Decades-old rules make it too easy for the state to block housing developments or for frivolous lawsuits to freeze out energy and infrastructure investment. In their conclusion, Bowman and his co-authors strike a similar tone. “Britain can enjoy such a renewal once more,” they write. “To do so, it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do.”

Energy

Business

Food

Dominion Gets State Approval for Liquified Natural Gas Storage Facility in Virginia

Virginia’s largest utility received approval from its state regulators to construct a liquified natural gas storage facility for two of its gas-fired power stations in the Southside region of the state, despite opposition from environmental groups that favor more renewable energy. Dominion Energy received approval from the State Corporation Commission Monday to build the 25-million […]

The project comes in response to past winter events, but environmental groups say battery storage provides “real reliability.”By Charles PaullinVirginia’s largest utility received approval from its state regulators to construct a liquified natural gas storage facility for two of its gas-fired power stations in the Southside region of the state, despite opposition from environmental groups that favor more renewable energy.

Energy

Sometimes, when competitors collaborate, everybody wins

Engineers developed a planning tool that can help independent entities decide when they should invest in joint projects.

One large metropolis might have several different train systems, from local intercity lines to commuter trains to longer regional lines.When designing a system of train tracks, stations, and schedules in this network, should rail operators assume each entity operates independently, seeking only to maximize its own revenue? Or that they fully cooperate all the time with a joint plan, putting their own interest aside?In the real world, neither assumption is very realistic.Researchers from MIT and ETH Zurich have developed a new planning tool that mixes competition and cooperation to help operators in a complex, multiregional network strategically determine when and how they should work together.Their framework is unusual because it incorporates co-investment and payoff-sharing mechanisms that identify which joint infrastructure projects a stakeholder should invest in with other operators to maximize collective benefits. The tool can help mobility stakeholders, such as governments, transport agencies, and firms, determine the right time to collaborate, how much they should invest in cooperative projects, how the profits should be distributed, and what would happen if they withdrew from the negotiations.“It might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes you want to invest in your opponent so that, at some point, this investment will come back to you. Thanks to game theory, one can formalize this intuition to give rise to an interesting class of problems,” says Gioele Zardini, the Rudge and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), an affiliate faculty with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and senior author of a paper on this planning framework.Numerical analysis shows that, by investing a portion of their budget into some shared infrastructure projects, independent operators can earn more revenue than if they operated completely noncooperatively.In the example of the rail operators, the researchers demonstrate that co-investment also benefits users by improving regional train service. This win-win situation encourages more people to take the train, boosting revenues for operators and reducing emissions from automobiles, says Mingjia He, a graduate student at ETH Zurich and lead author.“The key point here is that transport network design is not a zero-sum game. One operator’s gain doesn’t have to mean the others’ loss. By shifting the perception from isolated, self-optimization to strategic interaction, cooperation can create greater value for everyone involved,” she says.Beyond transportation, this planning framework could help companies in a crowded industry or governments of neighboring countries test co-investment strategies.He and Zardini are joined on the paper by ETH Zurich researchers Andrea Censi and Emilio Frazzoli. The research will be presented at the 2025 American Control Conference (ACC), and the paper has been selected as a Student Best Paper Award finalist.Mixing cooperation and competitionBuilding transportation infrastructure in a multiregional network typically requires a huge investment of time and resources. Major infrastructure projects have an outsized impact that can stretch far beyond one region or operator.Each region has its own priorities and decision-makers, such as local transportation authorities, which often results in the failure of coordination.“If local systems are designed separately, regional travel may be more difficult, making the whole system less efficient. But if self-interested stakeholders don’t benefit from coordination, they are less likely to support the plan,” He says.To find the best mix of cooperation and competition, the researchers used game theory to build a framework that enables operators to align interests and improve regional cooperation in a way that benefits all.For instance, last year the Swiss government agreed to invest 50 million euros to electrify and expand part of a regional rail network in Germany, with the goal of creating a faster rail connection between three Swiss cities.The researchers’ planning framework could help independent entities, from regional governments to rail operators, identify when and how to undertake such collaborations.The first step involves simulating the outcomes if operators don’t collaborate. Then, using the co-investment and payoff-sharing mechanisms, the decision-maker can explore cooperative approaches.To identify a fair way to split revenues from shared projects, the researchers design a payoff-sharing mechanism based on a game theory concept known as the Nash bargaining solution. This technique will determine how much benefit operators would receive in different cooperative scenarios, taking into account the benefits they would achieve with no collaboration.The benefits of co-investmentOnce they had designed the planning framework, the researchers tested it on a simulated transportation network with multiple competing rail operators. They assessed various co-investment ratios across multiple years to identify the best decisions for operators.In the end, they found that a semicooperative approach leads to the highest returns for all stakeholders. For instance, in one scenario, by co-investing 50 percent of their total budgets into shared infrastructure projects, all operators maximized their returns.In another scenario, they show that by investing just 3.3 percent of their total budget in the first year of a multiyear cooperative project, operators can boost outcomes by 30 percent across three metrics: revenue, reduced costs for customers, and lower emissions.“This proves that a small, up-front investment can lead to significant long-term benefits,” He says.When they applied their framework to more realistic multiregional networks where all regions weren’t the same size, this semicooperative approach achieved even better results.However, their analyses indicate that returns don’t increase in a linear way — sometimes increasing the co-investment ratio does not increase the benefit for operators.Success is a multifaceted issue that depends on how much is invested by all operators, which projects are chosen, when investment happens, and how the budget is distributed over time, He explains.“These strategic decisions are complex, which is why simulations and optimization are necessary to find the best cooperation and negotiation strategies. Our framework can help operators make smarter investment choices and guide them through the negotiation process,” she says.The framework could also be applied to other complex network design problems, such as in communications or energy distribution.In the future, the researchers want to build a user-friendly interface that will allow a stakeholder to easily explore different collaborative options. They also want to consider more complex scenarios, such as the role policy plays in shared infrastructure decisions or the robust cooperative strategies that handle risks and uncertainty.This work was supported, in part, by the ETH Zurich Mobility Initiative and the ETH Zurich Foundation.

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