J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, joined at right by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), speaks with reporters following a GOP strategy lunch, at the Capitol in Washington, June 7, 2023.
Ensuring the reliability of the electric grid should be at the top of the country’s infrastructure to-do list. It barely is. The American Society of Civil Engineers rated the country’s energy networks a C-minus in 2021, a sorry state of affairs in a country that hedges on moving toward adoption of clean energy sources and away from fossil fuels to stave off the most severe effects of the climate crisis. In the short term, grid operators must confront major threats like severe weather and power outages during periods of peak demand. Over the longer term, these systems require upgrades, replacements, and a historic expansion to bring renewable energy sources to the nation.
Congress has so studiously avoided acting on grid issues that it was surprising to find transmission issues inserted into the hostage negotiations that supplanted a clean debt ceiling bill. Permitting for fossil fuel transmission was eased, as some National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) timelines were shaved. Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) pet project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, won a provision that effectively exempted it from any further oversight. As for interregional electric transmission issues, however, they were consigned to a study, a special ring of legislative hell where critical issues go to fossilize.
“We are losing time because every piece of fossil fuel infrastructure we need to take offline needs to be replaced by something,” says Ben Pendergrass, the Citizens’ Climate Lobby vice president of government affairs. “Right now, we don’t have all the capacity we need to get that renewable power to American households.”
At a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on electric grid reliability held the day after the debt ceiling bill passed last week, Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) asked James Robb, the head of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), which oversees the regional transmission planning organizations that operate the grid, if NERC, along with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and other regional transmission entities, would be able to speed up delivery of the transmission study mandated by the debt ceiling agreement from about two to three years to six to eight months.
Robb diplomatically pronounced himself “surprised” but “enthused” about the mandated study (the “right-minded thing to do,” he called it) and declined to speculate about the possibility of meeting a shorter timeline.
The open secret about transmission studies, however, is that they are nothing if not ubiquitous, from the tomes regularly served up by federal and state agencies to the reports and analyses that transmission planning entities generate. Indeed, a “Report on Barriers and Opportunities for High Voltage Transmission,” which the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) prepared for Congress in 2020, clearly identified the barriers that make transmission lines challenging to get off the ground: thickets of state government processes; the need for federal, state, and local authorizations and reviews; reliability standards; stakeholder requirements; and so on. (There are also concerns that the Department of Energy is better equipped to conduct the necessary modeling studies than FERC and NERC, which may be more susceptible to industry influence.)
What the country lacks is the political will to outline a national energy plan that tackles power transfers between regions during periods of high demand.
The Biden administration offers incentives to speed the adoption of electric vehicles and build the associated charging networks, but large-scale electrification has seen no such speed-up. The country is not on pace to handle mass EV adoption. The U.S. will have to invest multibillions in clean-energy technologies, including the transmission lines that move wind and solar power, to achieve net-zero targets by 2050. It is nowhere near those goals.
What the country lacks is the political will to outline a national energy plan that tackles power transfers between regions during periods of high demand and lays out how to bring renewable energy online as fast as the climate crisis demands. Or as NERC’s Robb said, “How much do you value having 24/7 energy available to support the way of life that we have all become accustomed to?”
The North American electric grid is divided into a half dozen interconnections; the largest are the Eastern and Western Interconnections. These interconnections are further subdivided into regions overseen by NERC. In its 2023 Summer Reliability Assessment, NERC analysts expect to have enough energy resources to meet projected normal summer peak demand. A good chunk of the country, however, is at an elevated risk of not being able to meet more extreme demands if there are periods of prolonged heat or if there are severe storms that compromise a regional power supplier’s ability to meet those demands.
Over the next decade, the assessment shows areas of the country, including California and the 15 Midwestern and Southern tier states covered by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (ISO), will fall into high-risk areas where suppliers may not be able to meet peak demands. Supply chain issues also plague the sector still. A shortage of labor, material, and equipment needed to perform regular maintenance activities may affect the ability of some utilities to prepare for these seasonal conditions.
Age poses one set of reliability concerns. Many transmission and distribution lines have hit 60-year to 70-year milestones. Some even have hit the century mark. Grid investments have increased over the past decade, driven by the twin goals of increasing reliability and incorporating more clean energy into the power mix. Two competitive DOE grant programs totaling $13 billion under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and another $3 billion in transmission funding in the Inflation Reduction Act taken together have been dubbed by the Biden administration “the largest single direct federal investment in critical transmission and distribution infrastructure.”
Despite some increases in spending, the electricity infrastructure investment gap between the amount needed to meet current electric demands and the amount required to satisfy future ones is real, and most acute in the Northeast and West, totaling more than $200 billion by 2029. This situation has created a crazy quilt of upgrades and modernizations of varying quality as well as concerns about reliability when wind and solar generation are insufficient to meet demand.
The Building Integrated Grids With Inter-Regional Energy Supply (BIG WIRES) proposal co-sponsored by Sen. Hickenlooper and Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA) would have enabled the country’s transmission planning regions to be able to transfer at least 30 percent of their peak demand between these areas, and empowered FERC to direct the regions to construct a coordinated interregional transmission system to standardize these upgrades, lowering costs for consumers and increasing the grid’s ability to handle extreme weather and threats such as cyber attacks.
Clean-energy advocates wanted to see at least the core of BIG WIRES included in the debt ceiling agreement. As Ben Pendergrass of Citizens’ Climate Lobby put it, “This idea has been something that FERC has been thinking about for years; it knows that the need to transfer power between regions is well established.”
Rep. Peters says that transmission will have to be a part of any new power infrastructure agreement. “We need 200,000 miles of transmission lines to accommodate the transition of clean energy … [But we’re building only] 1,800 a year,” he told a permitting summit held by the global news outlet Semafor. Republicans typically have preferred that regional transmission entities design their own systems—a concept that runs smack up against the kind of real coordination that an integrated national system requires if the nation is to confront the climate crisis. (Republicans also typically prefer the fossil fuel industry and its pipelines over the wind and solar industries, which are dependent on the electric grid.)
But leaving regions to their own devices has left Texas vulnerable to massive system failures. In 2021, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) that oversees the Texas grid could not furnish adequate power to heat homes for more than a week, consigning residents to a severe deep freeze that killed nearly 250 people—all because decades ago it walled itself off from the ability to obtain power from other regional interconnections, precisely to avoid FERC’s regulatory oversight.
Texas is unlikely to change its ways, says Christopher Knittel, a professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “They’ve done the trade-off between reliability plus regulation from the federal government and a less reliable grid plus no regulation from the federal government, and they have chosen the latter,” he says. “But as the climate is changing, and as they themselves are relying on intermittent renewables, it certainly might be the case that the right answer now is to interconnect, even if they didn’t 20 to 30 years ago.”
Grid operators in one region of the country typically can rely on other regions to assist in emergencies precisely to avoid some of the kinds of problems that Texas encountered. “Well connected” is how Bob Ethier, ISO New England’s vice president of system planning, describes his organization’s joint planning efforts with neighboring systems in New York as well as Nova Scotia. “Interfaces and interconnections are important,” he says, “but I don’t know that we view them as particularly problematic right now.”
He also noted that ISO New England’s involvement in Central Maine Power’s New England Clean Energy Connect transmission project will bring hydropower from Quebec to Massachusetts to respond to future demand. Yet this project also illustrates the siting tensions involved. Controversial from its inception, voters rejected the project in a 2021 referendum. However, in a recent unanimous verdict a jury agreed that the company had made enough headway on construction prior to the voter referendum to move forward.
These conundrums illustrate the longer-term obstacles involved in moving power generated by wind, solar, and hydro resources to the far-flung households and businesses that will ultimately use that power. Currently, those transmission lines have yet to be built, and where they do exist, they need to be upgraded or replaced if, for example, they’re to move offshore wind energy to households further inland. Even where today’s transmission system may be well equipped to handle current energy demands, it still needs to rightsize itself to handle energy demands that may double by 2050.
But siting transmission lines leads to all sorts of environmental and legal fights, and they can take up to five years to build once permits are secured. “The reason for that,” says Knittel of MIT, “is that they are long and skinny and go through lots and lots of backyards, which is a convoluted process absent resorting to eminent domain.” Indeed, a proposed set of lines that would bring Wyoming wind power to California only recently received the go-ahead following a permitting process that took 18 years.
It is possible that components of BIG WIRES and bills like the Streamlining Interstate Transmission of Electricity (SITE) Act, sponsored by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), which would establish new federal siting authority within FERC to speed the construction of interregional high-voltage transmission lines, may provide the building blocks for a possible bipartisan action. Republicans, however, may insist on linking such provisions to others that ease the permitting of fossil fuel pipelines.
“The study I would like to see, if we did a study,” says Knittel, “is how are we going to change federal and state laws so we can more easily site these transmission lines; whether that is a greater reliance on eminent domain, whether that’s giving more power to FERC for siting purposes, or trying as good as possible to get everybody into the room to negotiate.” He adds, “The current way we do things makes it too easy to block socially beneficial transmission lines.”
What is also clear is that Democrats lost some leverage by caving on NEPA timelines, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and acquiescing to a study. After all, Republicans succeeded in getting what they wanted and may now feel emboldened to demand further concessions in areas that touch on transmission line siting, such as the Endangered Species Act and judicial review in pipeline disputes.
