GREASE Lightning: How States Can Win in the Electro-Industrial Era

America is entering an electro-industrial era: electrification, advanced manufacturing, and artificial intelligence compute are driving new demand for power, sites, and talent. The winners will be the states that can reliably deliver projects on time. In this talk, RMI will share insights from its newly released report, GREASE Lightning: A playbook for investment-led, state-driven electro-industrial economies, which explains how shifts in technology, geography, and policy are reshaping where and how investment lands and why some states are pulling ahead. Against that backdrop, we will introduce the GREASE framework (Governance, Regional Targeting, Expansive Ambition, Accountability, Sector Strategies, and Environmental Co-Benefits) as a practical “delivery operating system” that helps states design investment-led strategies fit for this new era. We will then pair GREASE with state-level modeling developed with Rhodium Group that estimates the impacts of these strategies at the state and regional level. The talk connects policy design to quantified outcomes: how investment-led choices influence where investment lands, how quickly clean electricity and enabling infrastructure can be built, what happens to emissions and power prices, and what communities can expect in jobs and broader economic value when projects move from announcement to operation. We will close with an evidence-backed playbook: how to set up governance that accelerates decisions, focus scarce resources on the regions where advantages compound, design sector-specific policy stacks that reduce execution risk, and build accountability systems that track real milestones (interconnection, construction, commissioning) rather than press releases. The core message of this presentation is simple: if we want more clean power built faster, we have to treat delivery capacity as the strategy—and GREASE, backed by modeling, shows how.