The New Yorker has a big new feature on power lines. This could be a watershed moment transmission development in the U.S. For years, America’s left-wing climate change conversation centered around renewable generation, electrification and conservation, omitting the infrastructure needed to bring on new generation and meet new demand. Consequently, many of those most concerned with climate change did little to promote new power lines, even opposing them at times.
The consequence of the nation’s general ignorance about transmission’s importance has been acute stagnation in the sector. Consider this fact highlighted in a 2021 Atlantic article: “Since 2009, China has built more than 18,000 miles of ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines. The U.S. has built zero.”
There is a reason we are so bad at transmission. Regulations at every level make it very hard to get projects off the ground, plain and simple. The regulatory barriers facing transmission developers were highlighted in a report by the nonprofit Americans for a Clean Energy Grid two years ago. The study identified 22 shovel-ready projects that have been in existence for a decade or more. To get such projects off the ground, the report’s authors suggested streamlining project siting and permitting, passing a tax credit for transmission projects, and direct investment by the federal government.
In a democracy like ours, public support is usually crucial to making the kind of tough legislative changes that would facilitate a rapid transmission buildout. The public needs to know why this is important, however, which is why the New Yorker article is so important. Here are some key excerpts:
“One of the biggest obstacles that the United States faces in its fight against climate change is getting renewable energy to the places that need the most electricity. Many of the best locations for wind and solar farms are, by their very nature, remote. And moving that energy elsewhere requires navigating a byzantine permitting process for transmission lines and winning over landowners—or, if they can’t be won over, then deciding whether and when the need for a given project outweighs their concerns. “The scale of the undertaking and the speed at which it needs to occur are incredibly daunting,” Romany Webb, the deputy director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, at Columbia Law School, told me. “We’re talking about a massive build-out of new, large-scale infrastructure across the country, and we need to do it, like, yesterday.”
“It’s getting them through the permitting process, from federal environmental reviews to local road-use agreements, that’s difficult. (The Grain Belt Express could require approval from more than twenty federal and state authorities.) In September of last year, Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., published a report from the consulting firm Grid Strategies that identified thirty-six planned high-capacity lines, from the New England Clean Power Link, in Vermont, to the TransWest Express, which will run from Wyoming to cities in the Southwest. All told, the report estimates, these ten thousand miles of “shovel ready” lines could increase wind and solar generation in the U.S. by eighty-seven per cent. Only ten have broken ground. “We really don’t have time to waste,” Christina Hayes, the executive director of A.C.E.G., told me. “We have about a lost decade on this.”
I’m cautiously optimistic about the impact articles like this will have. If they mobilize liberal constituencies to rally behind transmission development, then great. However, my fear is that in mobilizing liberal constituencies to rally behind transmission development, they cause a right-wing reaction. In our current polarized political climate, both liberals and conservatives can be guilty of ‘opositism’, opposing a position merely because the other side supports it. Other infrastructure efforts have proved surprisingly bi-partisan in recent years, however.
Fingers crossed.