Brown said the roads would not take the wear and tear that building a wind farm would entail, as they aren’t traveling in with heavy loads such as big wind turbines. He said the transmission stations will be brought in pieces and put together on site.

Brown also assured commissioners that the easement talks were peaceful and so far only a handful of requests have gone to court.
“We don’t want to use imminent domain,” he said. “We don’t want to use attorneys, we would rather have a conversation with landowners.”

... only a handful of requests have gone to court.

“Eminent Domain is something of a last resort used here,” Pnazek said. “In Kansas and Missouri to date, Invenergy has signed up about 65% of the affected parcels on a voluntary basis, and those are the approach that we’d be taking here as well as we progress the project through Illinois.”

Brown also told commissioners that there need not be concern over pushy land agents, stating that Invenergy hires reputable and credible agents but told the commissioners to contact him with any concerns.

"We didn't file bankruptcy sooner as we still wanted to fight the case, and prove our innocence. As a matter of fact, we were exploring options for additional funding for the company and pro bono litigation services.  But, when the rubber hit the road, we couldn't make it work.  The best case scenario was that we'd win with a damning opinion from the court. So what? I'd never receive any consideration/reimbursement, and FERC would ignore the precedent in the future enforcement efforts anyway," said Gates.

"It's a negative feedback loop -- this type of outcome just emboldens the FERC and encourages them to file more frivolous/bogus lawsuits which will further weigh on the courts.  The only way to stop this to have someone go the distance and have someone from the FERC lose their law license, or something, to discourage abusive prosecution. Or structural changes within the courts (loser pays victors legal fees?), and certainly overhauling and perhaps eliminating the administrative state could help.  Until then, the government does whatever the government wants to do, and can do so with impunity."

"We got the sense that our judge didn't really want to try the case. She took two years to rule on de novo review several years ago (which could have been a ruling she could have made from the bench) and we felt pressure to make "business decisions".  As a citizen of the country, this makes me sad -- you expect to go into the courts and have a judge who wants to dole out justice.  But, in reality, I guess the system is overloaded and would simply crash if most actions didn't get settled. I heard that COVID exacerbated the problems -- apparently, the judges are up to their eyeballs in work and are just overwhelmed.  So, the courts are really set-up to at least encourage, if not directly push, people to settle," said Gates.

"...and just in case some people want them underground your government and transmission companies will have a full array of irrational arguments and inflated costs to make sure nothing gets buried."

Environmentalists are associated with compensation packages; marginalized groups are associated with undergrounding and combined remediation; and environmentalists, the federal government, and the breadth of coalition actors is associated with the combined remediation outcome.

However, opponents often have differentiated goals, and a just outcome for one member of a coalition may be unjust for another.

Developers often determine the dimensions of the project, such as route options, during the upstream phase of the decision-making process (Cotton and Devine-Wright 2013). Public consultation can occur later, and community meetings can have the goals of limiting engagement to final route selection and of selling the project.

bundles new transmission with new clean energy — about 3,400 megawatts of new wind and solar capacity to be built upstate by EnergyRe and Invenergy, the latter a major clean energy developer. 

Of the project’s $11 billion price tag, about $3.5 billion would go toward building a 174-mile high-voltage direct-current transmission line capable of carrying 1,300 MW of power from upstate to New York City, with completion set for 2027. The remainder of the budget would fund the new wind and solar. 

The New York Power Authority will provide the right of way for much of the project underneath its existing 345-kilovolt overhead transmission line running from Utica to Orange County, with the remaining stretch buried along roadways and underneath the Hudson River.

... its use of underground high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) line along existing rights of way to minimize the risk of opposition from landowners and communities along the path of the project.... ​“We think that using existing rights of way is less impactful, both ecologically and in terms of communities and view corridors,” he said. ​“We think that this project will serve as an example for the rest of the nation on how to solve these complex issues.”

There’s certainly a need for strategies to enable massive grid expansion that can accommodate large amounts of new wind and solar power. Proposed transmission projects can face a decade or more of challenges related to siting, permitting and cost allocation. These hurdles have fatally tripped up several high-profile projects over the past decade. 

Burying HVDC cables along existing railroads and highways can dramatically simplify the process, bypassing the need to get permits from multiple states, counties and private landholders for overhead transmission towers. Technology advances over the past decade have allowed these types of projects to compete with overhead lines on cost.

The Commission’s incentive policies— particularly the CWIP Incentive, which allows recovery of costs before a project has been put into service—run the risk of making consumers “the bank” for the transmission developer; but, unlike a real bank, which gets to charge interest for the money it loans, under our existing incentives policies the consumer not only effectively “loans” the money through the formula rates mechanism, but also pays the utility a profit, known as Return on Equity, or “ROE,” for the privilege of serving as the utility’s de facto lender. There is something wrong with this picture.

Some communities are pushing back on the idea of agricultural land and other places being used for large scale wind and solar farms.

Biden asked what the electric companies are hearing on those types of arguments, using the opportunity to also take a swipe at former President Trump, who claimed in 2019 that wind turbine noise causes cancer.

“Generic question: Are you getting less resistance when you talk about wind and windmills? I know they cause cancer,” he said, drawing laughter from the room. Experts have debunked that claim.

“Bad joke,” Biden said.

“The tax credits will make more sophisticated energy infrastructure much less expensive,” said Pat Vincent-Collawn, CEO of New Mexico-based PNM Resources Inc.

An aggressive clean energy transition will be a pricey one, especially for the electricity industry, which is among the most capital-intensive sectors in the United States. The industry collectively spent $143.3 billion in capital expenditures in 2021, EEI said.

Regulated electric companies are allowed to recoup investments from customers, plus earn a profit. That is a key reason why electric companies are pushing Congress to pass these tax credits: It softens the blow to consumers, who eventually will pay for the transmission lines, solar arrays and wind farms.

“Those benefits actually flow through to our customers and the economy,” Akins of AEP said at the White House.

Prior to the event, EEI executives briefed Wall Street investors and analysts at the Nasdaq MarketSite.
There, Brian Wolff, EEI’s chief strategy officer, gave a nod to the meeting with Biden and doubled down on the electric companies’ efforts to ensure those tax credit proposals become law.

Akins said the plan to add renewables presents an opportunity to work with unions and to save customers billions of dollars. The challenge is siting and building transmission to support all of those renewables, he said.

“For us, it’s important to scope those projects,” he said. “The savings associated with the renewables will help us with the transition.”

The DOJ complaint and audit staff’s discussions on internal controls during onsite interviews of FESC employees raised audit staff’s concerns about the existence of significant shortcomings in FirstEnergy and its subsidiary companies’ controls over financial reporting, including controls over accounting for the costs of civic, political, and related activities, such as lobbying activities, performed by and on behalf of FirstEnergy and its subsidiaries. Moreover, these controls may have been circumvented in ways designed to conceal the nature and purpose of expenditures made and, as a result, that led to the improper inclusion of lobbying and other nonutility costs in wholesale rate determinations.

Even more concerning, several factual assertions agreed to by FirstEnergy in DPA and the remedies FirstEnergy agreed to undertake, point towards internal controls having been possibly obfuscated or circumvented to conceal or mislead as to the actual amounts, nature, and purpose of the lobbying expenditures made, and as a result, the improper inclusion of lobbying and other nonutility costs in wholesale transmission billing rates.

"And so what I want you to know is that you took advantage of my good grace. All of you. I'm going to say FERC especially. They were the ones coming in and telling me, "Listen, we're going to do it. We're going to do it. We're going to settle the case. We're going to settle the case.
And I take at your word what the United States of America says to a federal judge. I used to represent the United States of America. And what you say is extremely meaningful. It would never occur to me that a United States agency would put a case on hold for more than a year telling the judge that they were going to settle when they weren't.  Now, I can tell you, I don't know who's being unreasonable, but it better not be FERC because I feel lied to. I'm going to tell you that."

What I am hearing is there is an entity who is being sued and is claiming it's broke. Now, that to me suggests what are you going to get? You're going to get years of litigating money that they say they don't have.

We're going to have a trial, and if you win,  you're going to get years of litigation about money that they say they don't have. And I can tell you I  know in this circumstance, not through anything I have heard from a magistrate judge, but from my nine years  of experience settling over 600 cases that somebody or more than one somebody is being completely unreasonable.