More Transmission Dead Ends

Our bloated government and its clean energy sycophants are on a high-speed transmission train to nowhere and a crucial bridge is on fire.  Trouble ahead!  Can these self-important bloviators cross the bridge to Unicorn Utopia before it completely burns through?

Of course not.  This bridge has been burning for several years now and is pretty thin.  I'm talking about the landowner bridge... the landowners who are expected to accept the greatest impacts of new transmission lines on new rights of way across their private property. 

The Unicorn Engineers are positively obsessed with finding the solution to transmission opposition.  They continue to dream up stupid, unworkable ideas that will only further delay Unicorn Utopia.  How do I know this?  Because I have been a transmission opponent, and more importantly I have listened to the stories of hundreds of transmission opposing landowners over the past 15 years or so.  Why are the Unicorn Engineer ideas so bad?  Because they have never been transmission opponents and they have little understanding of how and why opposition forms and acts, and have never felt the emotions that go into landowner battles.

This week I came across a couple of bad ideas and one bright spot.

The first is an op-ed in Utility Dive written by former state and FERC Commissioner Tony Clark.  He talks about dumb plans to federalize transmission permitting.

The renewables spurred by the IRA require a considerable transmission buildout. Accomplishing it will be no mean feat. The most oft-proposed solution is to federalize ever more of the transmission planning and permitting process. That may sound better in theory than in practice.

Furthermore, the federal government has a dismal record in streamlining infrastructure permitting, even when it is needed. Look no further than the Western U.S., where federal lands are often an obstacle to transmission, rather than a facilitator of it.

So... permitting reform... Big NO!

But then Clark combine electrics transmission permitting with gas pipeline permitting to incorrectly conclude that we need to cripple NEPA.

Infrastructure opponents have had increasing success obstructing projects with a federal nexus. FERC’s natural gas pipeline certification program is a good reference point. Activists have blocked needed energy projects through the aggressive use of litigation at every step of the permitting and review process. Without meaningful reform to federal laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act, all those litigation weapons will now be in the hands of interveners seeking to stop electric transmission lines.

Can you say hypocrites, Tony?  The ones who use NEPA as a battering ram would never stoop to help an electric transmission opponent.  Despite pretending that their opposition is about landowners and the environment, the truth is that the big green groups are motivated by politics, grants and donations that pay fat salaries.  Landowners and the environment be damned.  The fact is that electric transmission opposition is devoid of politics.  We're about what unites us as landowners, not what divides us at the ballot box.  We've already got a great strategy and a bottomless bag of tricks developed over the years.  We don't need to be hypocrites like the environmental groups.

And here's a different article with another stupid idea -- bribing unaffected community members to accept impacts ON THE LAND OF THEIR NEIGHBORS.

Beyond just educating the neighbors of a proposed project, former U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III (D-Mass.), now managing director of Citizens Energy, said developers and utilities should explore ways to ensure that the expansions directly benefit those communities.

Such arrangements can prove worthwhile even to for-profit companies by alleviating residents’ concerns that large transmission projects could lower property values or disrupt their neighborhoods with no visible benefit to them, Kennedy said. The costs of the delays or resiting of projects can often well exceed the expense of profit sharing with those communities, he argued.

But this doesn't work either.  Landowners with new transmission on their property are the ones leading the opposition and they are not going to be deterred by bribes paid to their neighbors.  Those bribes don't do a thing to alleviate the landowner burden.  The bribes actually juice opposition to work harder.

And here's another stupid idea from the same article:

Former FERC Commissioner Colette Honorable, now a partner at Reed Smith leading the firm’s energy regulatory group, noted that getting all parties on board with a project in the early phases can reduce the likelihood of prolonged, and expensive, delays at FERC and the federal courts.

Earlier engagement does not bear fruit unless there is compromise on both sides.  What do impacted landowners get from earlier engagement?  If it's not something that prevents impacts, such as burial along existing rights of way like highways, or reconductoring existing lines, then landowners get nothing.  Again, urging people to throw your neighbor under the bus is not a successful strategy.

But Honorable does offer some valuable insight gleaned from her years as a state and federal regulator.

“You’re in trouble if you have a matter pending and the first time you hear them is when they object,” she said.

Likewise, she said incorporating equity into the work done by RTOs can be accomplished by examining what voices are missing at the table and including those stakeholders who aren’t represented.

It's so simple, it's stunning.  Landowners are the missing voices.  Ignoring them absolutely guarantees that the opposition will continue.