IN THE RACE to address a changing climate and transition to a clean energy future, Massachusetts is in an all-out sprint. Massive wind, solar, and battery projects are at various stages of development statewide. Meanwhile, residents, businesses, and governments are embracing electric vehicles, heat pumps, and other technologies that are becoming more affordable, ubiquitous and, in some cases, mandated.

All of it–every new wind turbine, electric vehicle, and smart thermostat–is critical to helping Massachusetts achieve its climate change goals. But to fully implement the state’s climate strategy, Massachusetts also needs to upgrade its electric grid to support the growth of clean energy and beneficial electrification and to withstand increasingly severe weather.

Regulators have projected nearly 50 percent of the region’s transmission will be overloaded by 2050 and will need significant new transmission and distribution to interconnect clean energy generation. For example, just last week, the New York ISO issued a warning about challenges to serve New York due to increasing demand and limited generation. This comes as federal regulators are issuing dire warnings about reliability challenges after powerful storms knocked systems offline between 2018 and 2022.

Like every state in the nation, Massachusetts must make necessary investments to expand, harden, and modernize its transmission and electric distribution system so the grid becomes a platform capable of effectively integrating this influx of clean energy.

To its credit, Massachusetts is taking those challenges head on with a roadmap for grid modernization – known as Electric Sector Modernization Plans. State regulators have mandated that utility companies assemble plans for how they will update their infrastructure–not only to ensure resiliency, improve reliability, and avert outages, but also for how they plan to address climate and security threats, and leverage and optimize distributed technologies.

That work requires a wide range of investments, all of which are critical to Massachusetts meeting its climate change goals. Some are obvious, such as expanding the capacity of wires to move more electricity through them and hardening substations and other assets so they can withstand increasingly common extreme weather events.

Other projects are equally necessary, but more behind-the-scenes. They include upgrading IT infrastructure and installing smart devices to better prevent outages and more quickly restore power, providing more information to grant customers more insight and access to their bills, and building security infrastructure to stave off cyberattacks.

Grid modernization projects are large, multi-faceted, and often expensive projects that require time to plan, engineer, and build, but if Massachusetts is to meet its climate goals while ensuring reliability and security, these investments are essential. Conversations about new solar farms or battery facilities can’t happen without considering the grid’s readiness and how much time it will take to have the necessary grid infrastructure in place. If clean energy is the car, then a modernized grid is the highway; both are necessary components for the successful achievement of Massachusetts’ climate and grid infrastructure goals.

Massachusetts is asking the necessary questions to mitigate the effects of a changing climate and steward in a new era of clean energy. However, state policymakers and industry stakeholders will need to address, and invest in, both sides of this issue—innovation and infrastructure—if Massachusetts is to successfully transition to the clean energy future that its residents want and deserve.

Karen Wayland is the CEO of the GridWise Alliance.