Gun - you hit the nail on the head "if they can be convinced of the fact that using ACCC to reconductor some of the already existing lines would slow the building of new ones"
In many cases this totally avoids need for new R/W and dramatically reduces cost of beefing up the grid -- acquiring the R/W is the most time consuming, public impacting and expensive part of building transmission lines
sometimes the uts need a new line to provide redundancy - a second path in the event of a line being take out of service
I asked JC about teaming up with environmentalist groups and he said they were looking at that, but I think he was thinking the emf issue ???