Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial connection. The term astroturfing is derived from AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to resemble natural grass, as a play on the word "grassroots". The implication behind the use of the term is that instead of a "true" or "natural" grassroots effort behind the activity in question, there is a "fake" or "artificial" appearance of support.

“Local community opposition is real and will likely continue to make siting and permitting a challenge,” but might be addressable, said University of Notre Dame Associate Professor of Sustainable Energy Policy Emily Grubert, who has worked with federal agencies on related issues.

To earn a community’s trust, development proposals “should explain why a project is needed, why the community’s resources are needed, and how the community can benefit,” Grubert said. They should also “assure the community its concerns have been heard and it will be protected,” she added.

DOE’s formal Community Benefits Agreements, which are used for new infrastructure development and stipulate the benefits a developer will deliver for the community, “could also have a powerful impact on streamlining siting and permitting,” Grubert said.

“No project should go ahead without a Community Benefit Agreement to assure real benefits for the host community,” agreed NRDC’s Greene. But in many places, “political polarization has turned reasonable project development questions into obstructive, misinformation campaigns,” Greene said. “Overcoming that will take a lot of work,” he added.

neighborhood associations, faith-based organizations, unions, environmental groups and others representing the interests of a community that will be impacted by development(s).

A CBA is an agreement signed by community benefit groups and a developer, identifying the community benefits a developer agrees to deliver, in return for community support of the project.

1.  Research development proposals in their region to identify any that have the potential to offer benefits to the residents they will be operating near;
2.  Organize a broad-based coalition of community interests and recruit stakeholder organizations;
3.  Hold public meetings and maximize turnout with help from local leaders; and
4.  Engage the developer with sustainable community objectives, via open dialogue as well as transparency.

“People, especially in smaller communities, can get very passionate, and even exchange death threats, which shows how important and undervalued trust is,” Grubert agreed.

[community] support would raise the probability of state or local government approvals for zoning variances, state permits, and other regulatory approvals.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

The Chrysalis Energy partnership will focus across 1.5 million acres of mainly contiguous, rights-owned land within Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.

"The sheer magnitude of the land position is remarkable, likely the single largest private land inventory in PJM and comprising 1/1000th of the entire continental US acreage.

Within the scope of the JV, OYA and OWS will develop, construct, jointly own and operate an extensive portfolio of renewable energy assets across OWS’s current land inventory.

Transmission’s Moment

Michael Skelly, founder and CEO of Grid United, marveled at the attentiveness of the audience at his panel discussion Oct. 11.

“It may be that this is because transmission is one of the most legally intense aspects of the energy transition. Or as we say — ruefully — in our company, ‘No lawyer left behind,’” he said. “Or maybe we’re just having a moment with transmission. ... Transmission was in Esquire magazine. Come on.” Esquire’s article was titled, "The Sexiest Part of the Clean Energy Transition Is Big-Ass Power Lines.”

Previous winners of the Ripple of Hope Award include Stacey Abrams, former Vice President Joe Biden, Bono, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, George Clooney, Tim Cook, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Amanda Gorman, Vice President Kamala Harris, Dolores Huerta, Colin Kaepernick, late Congressman John Lewis, former President Barack Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Desmond Tutu.

"Robert F. Kennedy's vision of a better world spanned all areas and industries – he understood that advancing human rights and social justice requires investment in everything from education to energy and the environment," said Polsky. "I'm honored to receive this award and look forward to growing Invenergy's impact as we fulfill our mission as innovators building a sustainable world."
Shaped by Polsky's philanthropic values, Invenergy invests heavily in project communities through an impact program. His humble roots ignited a commitment by him and his family to giving back to many causes including education, entrepreneurship, climate and sustainability, healthcare, women's rights, immigration, veterans, and arts and culture. Most recently, Polsky's philanthropic efforts have been focused on his native Ukraine to ensure the well-being of Ukraine's people, the nation's victory, and ultimate reconstruction. 
The Ripple of Hope Award is inspired by Robert F. Kennedy's most famous speech, the 1966 Day of Affirmation address he gave in South Africa at the height of apartheid: "Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples to build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

Smith says it is unfair for farmers to have their land used against their consent when they are the ones who have maintained the land for decades. 

"They weren't here when we were bringing in the crops in the fall," Smith said. "They weren't here when my family was bringing in the cows and vaccinating them. They weren't here for planting."

...farmers have earned the right to manage their land as they see fit. “We like to be able to look out at see this without any big power lines,” Smith said.

"Some farmers are not necessarily going to want this going across their farms, but others are going to welcome the opportunity because they could make some additional money for the rights of way," McCarty said.

"If you ask any farmer, they will tell you they can't pay me enough to put that line through my farm," Smith said. 

"And also understand that it may help them get out of a jam if they’re able to get power from that source when otherwise they wouldn’t be able to."

McCarty says projects like the Grain Belt Express are necessities to several parts of the community. 

"Electricity is an essential commodity," McCarty said. "We have to have it to run our farms, we have to have it to run our businesses, we have to have it in our homes."

The Tiger Connector would expand the reach of the Grain Belt Express in Missouri by bringing power from the main line in northern Missouri to the McCredie Substation in Callaway County, which would send that energy out to thousands more Missouri homes and businesses. 

It’s not just state regulatory authorities that reject transmission projects when they don’t see a benefit. Ranchers and other local landowners are sometimes put off by how these (admittedly hulking) metal constructs will look on their property. The lines can be buried underground—or even underwater—but it’s more expensive. Everybody has a price, and you might just as easily find success paying the landowner what you would’ve spent burying the line.

That makes using existing infrastructure corridors so enticing. We’ve already got tracts of land connecting different parts of the country that are pre-approved for public works projects, like highways and railroads. If we could layer in transmission lines, it would avoid a lot of these land-use conflicts. We could also use existing electricity corridors to pump through a lot more power using modern technology. Issues remain: Our roadways are usually designed with shoulders where people can regain control of their cars if they veer off the road, which doesn’t always leave room for power lines. But many places, such as along railroads, should have sufficient capacity. You could run high voltage, direct current lines through those areas to high-population centers in need of clean energy.

And the most productive solar and wind farms will not be located right next door to our population centers. Broadly speaking, they’ll be in more rural areas in the middle of the country, while the majority of people live on the coasts. Many of the rest live in metro areas inland. We need to move clean power from the places where we’ll harvest the bulk of it to the places where we’ll consume the bulk of it.

“Transmission, these big regional lines, often have benefit-cost ratios of 2:1 or 3:1, and that's because you can access resources that are on really low-cost land. Sometimes these solar and wind plants produce twice as much power at a given location than if you get closer to [where it’s used].”

​In practice, these lines would primarily carry energy from the center of the country—between Texas and North Dakota, where the wind really blows—to the East.  Others would carry energy from solar facilities in the South—particularly the Southwest, but also the Southeast—northwards.

The old environmental movement was about stopping things from getting built. The new environmental movement's about building stuff.

The fix is to make it easier to build large transmission lines in anticipation of need, like an interstate highway, and allow power markets to spring up near them like communities along the road. Sen. Joe Manchin’s larger permitting reform bill goes some way in this direction, making it easier to site these lines and setting time limits for the environmental review and stakeholder comment periods. (It would do the same for fossil-fuel projects, which climate activists are not happy about. The bill is on hold after Manchin agreed to pull it from a larger funding bill at the end of September.) The bill would develop predefined corridors where this stuff can go on federal land and make it easier to create these corridors in general. Finally, Gramlich says, it will help with cost allocation, creating a regulatory framework to recover the upfront cost of these large interstate lines.

Keeping the lights on is a matter of life and death, and so is transforming our energy system.

President Joe Biden needs to run transmission lines through deserts and over mountains to meet America’s climate goals.

NARUC contends that the major impediments to siting energy infrastructure, in general, and electric transmission, in particular, are (in no particular order): 1) the great difficulty in getting public acceptance for needed facilities, which in turn drives state and federal political opposition; 2) federal permitting issues, especially in regions where large tracts of land are federally owned; 3) potential customers for the project being considered do not need or want the additional electricity, thereby making the project uneconomical; and finally, 4) cost and cost allocation issues, which may make alternatives to building transmission more economical and/or more environmentally sound. With regard to federal permitting issues, these will only be exacerbated should FERC become more involved in siting, as is contemplated in the discussion draft, because opponents will now be able to use the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to slow or derail a project, as has been done quite successfully in FERC jurisdictional pipeline proceedings. This suggests that regardless of where siting authority falls –with state government, the federal government, or both –siting energy infrastructure will not be easy and there will be “no quick fix.”

“We need to get a better balance because we just can’t take 10 or 16 years to build a really good transmission project. It is not tolerable,” said Ken Wilson, an engineering fellow at Western Resource Advocates, an environmental group. “If that continues to be the norm, we’re not going to have an environment to worry about. It’s going to be burned up and dried up, and the stuff we wanted to protect won’t be there anymore.”

New Jersey officials hope to engage in “horse trading” with other PJM states over the cost allocation of transmission needed to meet their climate goals, a key state regulator said last week.

“The other clean energy states and PJM are looking at billions of dollars of transmission upgrades if we do it the way we’re doing it now, when we can meet all the needs of the entire PJM region at approximately the same price,” he said. “So there’s a lot of room for horse trading, if we can get the parties to the table.”

The SAA leaves New Jersey “almost in a hostage situation at the moment,” Silverman said. “The transmission projects that we are planning benefit many states in PJM; they will see lower production costs as a result of these upgrades. But because of the way the system works, we are solely responsible for the cost. That needs to change.”

Perhaps the most noteworthy transmission project in NextEra's portfolio is the Oklahoma/Arkansas portion of the Plains and Eastern Clean Line high-voltage direct-current, or HVDC, project. The project has had a tumultuous history, with the Tennessee Valley Authority backing away from the project in 2017 and the Energy Department terminating its participation in 2018. NextEra acquired Plains and Eastern Clean Line Oklahoma LLC in late 2017. Connecting Oklahoma and the state's formidable wind generation to Tennessee, the line would help alleviate growing wind curtailment in SPP while delivering potentially low-cost wind energy to the Southeast region. The project's status is up in the air.

HVDC transmission lines such as the Plains and Eastern Clean Line could emerge as a crucial piece of the clean energy transition. Although typically more costly than their AC counterparts, HVDC lines can carry more capacity across long distances while mitigating electricity losses, allowing for the transfer of wind and solar power from sparsely populated regions to urban metropolises hundreds of miles away. The Plains and Eastern Clean Line would run 720 miles and carry more than 4,000 MW of energy.

Additionally, a handful of major HVDC transmission projects are in planning, with renewable integration and transmission serving as a major driver for their development. The 550-mile SunZia Southwest Transmission Project being developed by Pattern Energy Group LP would connect Arizona to New Mexico, which has become a hub for renewable energy development. The 780-mile Grain Belt Express transmission line runs from Kansas to Indiana, eventually hooking up with the Pioneer Transmission project. Being developed by Invenergy LLC, the $7 billion project is expected to have a potential capacity of 5,000 MW.

MISO recently announced a major transmission upgrade project expected to cost $10.3 billion. The undertaking involves upgrading 18 different transmission lines and will reportedly help support 53 GW of new wind, solar and battery storage capacity across the region.

The remaining phases of the Project ("Segments 2 and 3") are under evaluation by MISO and PJM as part of the next planning review cycles.

Major transmission projects, particularly those that span multiple states, get caught up in arduous siting and permitting processes. The Grain Belt Express project, for instance, has been in the making for over a decade now. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is taking steps to ameliorate these preliminary planning hurdles. Still, without continuous diligent efforts to expedite grid infrastructure upgrades, industry stakeholders will struggle to meet state and federal clean energy goals.