How To Avoid Opposition To New Transmission Lines

I read a couple articles this week that demonstrate exactly how crucial host landowners and communities are to building the "clean energy" utopia.  They can't do it without us, folks!

They say that recognizing your flaws is the first step in solving your problem, but I'm not so sure these folks get it yet.  The solution is simple... don't cause impacts to land use and community values.  If you don't cause impacts, nobody cares all that much, certainly not enough to invest years of valuable time, and years of personal savings, fighting transmission proposals.  It's just that simple!!!

This vapid article on CNBC is not accurate.  Here's just one snippet of its inaccuracy:

On June 16, FERC issued issued a first step — technically called a “notice of proposed rulemaking” — that it aims to amend laws making it easier to connect sources of electricity to the grid.

FERC doesn't make laws, nor amend them.  It's an executive/administrative body.  It carries out the laws enacted by Congress.  Only a legislative body makes laws.  Just how dumb is this reporter anyhow?  FERC writes regulations, aka "rules, for how the laws Congress makes shall be carried out.  The laws governing connection to the electric grid haven't changed.  It's just that FERC wants to reimagine them to make them do something not written in statute.  And maybe that's all you need to now about FERC's rulemaking... and this reporter's knowledge of the facts.

Another fallacy...

The most productive geographical regions for wind and solar are generally far away from urban centers where the energy is needed.

The article includes a map of wind energy potential in the U.S.  The most productive places for wind are offshore, which is conveniently located near the most populated cities in the U.S.  It doesn't even make sense.  The reality is that the politically powerful people who live in those cities don't want wind energy infrastructure junking up their own back yard... the ultimate NIMBYs!  They want to put it in rural America, far from their own home, so they can reap all the benefits without any of the impacts.  The cities want to close all the "dirty" electric generators in their own back yard so that they can have a cleaner environment.  They are poised to spend trillions doing so.  If that's how they want to spend their money, have at it.  But when someone from rural America objects to having new industrial energy facilities to serve the cities sited in their own community, they get villainized as hating "clean energy."  They get accused of working for the Koch brothers, every armchair environmentalist's ultimate fossil fuel satan.  And when rural communities ask to have new transmission connecting new generators to cities buried on existing rights of way, they get told that's "too expensive" or simply impossible.

There’s also the possibility of putting transmission lines underground, which, “is much more economic today than it used to be,” Gramlich said. But it’s still expensive, as much as ten-fold the cost, depending on the terrain you are trying to go through, according to Robb of NERC. In some cases, for example, putting a transmission line means blasting through granite. So, while “that’s a viable thing to do, it’s a very expensive thing to do,” according to Robb.

It's really not that expensive, especially when it is sited in existing rail or highway rights of way.  Maybe double the cost, not ten times the cost.  Buried HVDC only needs a narrow, shallow trench 5 feet deep.  These guys need to break out of Thomas Edison's basement and read up on new technology... or better yet ask an engineer and quit trying to pretend they are experts.

So, the cost of cleaning up cities is not "too expensive" but the cost of avoiding impacts in rural communities is "too expensive."  This is nothing more than a value judgement -- the cities are "worth it" but the rural areas are not. 

What do any of these people (including the reporter) know about what motivates transmission opposition?  Only Sandy Howard knows, and the reporter conveniently wrote little about why Howard has devoted many years of her life to stopping NECEC.  Instead, the reporter focuses on the competing energy companies who poured money into stopping NECEC for their own reasons.  The reporter tries to make you believe that transmission opponents are just figureheads doing the bidding of fossil fuel companies who want to stop new transmission.  That's not true at all.  In fact, in my 15 years doing this, I have not seen any energy interests get involved in a transmission battle, except that one.  One instance does not make a trend.  These people need to quit making excuses and stop underestimating grassroots opposition.

If they want to end opposition, they need to find out what's causing it, and there's no better way than to engage with transmission opponents.  However, these self-congratulating chuckle heads prefer to insulate themselves and simply make crap up.  Such as this lovely theater at a recent industry nerdfest:

Overcoming NIMBYism on TransmissionLast August, the Niskanen Center and the Clean Air Task Force released a report that called for adoption of the “5 P framework” to overcome opposition to clean energy infrastructure. The construct builds on the transmission concept of “planning, permitting and paying.”

“We propose adding ‘participation’ as a fourth ‘P’ and then ‘process’ as [the fifth]. Because one of the challenges of transmission [is that] every single project is unique, because every state in every region is different,” said Liza Reed, Niskanen’s electricity transmission research manager for climate policy. “The reason that we raise participation up to an equal level with the other Ps … is that groups are really siloed in each of those policies right now. There is stakeholder engagement in planning. There is stakeholder engagement in permitting. There is stakeholder engagement in paying. But different stakeholders get brought in at different points, and that’s when groups start getting frustrated. And I think when folks hear the word ‘participation,’ they think angry town halls and lawsuits. But the whole point of bringing participation into a consistent process is to avoid that.”
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Joseph Rand offered an observation from his analyses on the siting and community impacts of large-scale wind and solar.
“What the wind energy developers have learned over time is that we need to move away from a process that people call ‘decide, announce, defend,’ [to one] called ‘consult, consider, modify, proceed,’ so that you’re meaningfully engaging local stakeholders in that process and being open to actually modifying your proposal,” said Rand, senior scientific engineering associate for the lab’s Electricity Markets and Policy Group.

...said the people who have never opposed transmission or been involved with any group that has.  In fact, these people LOVE transmission.  If they have a "plan" to end transmission opposition, it's probably not a very good one.  They don't understand the problem they're trying to solve.  These are the people who are trying to use transmission opponents as figureheads on their battering ram.  Niskanen needs to quit trying to pretend it represents transmission opposition groups.  It has nothing to do with any group.  Niskanen can take its 5 P's and turn them into one U.  Underground.  Simplicity is key, not years of ineffective policy-jockeying and "participation" that does not actually include any of the affected landowners and communities.  Shut up already, Niskanen.  You don't speak for us.  We're perfectly capable of speaking for ourselves.  You're just incapable of listening. 

And if you thought their ideas were bad, how about these from the CNBC article?

To spur grid expansion, the federal government should consider a tax credit for large scale transmission investment in current budget reconciliation policy discussions and the FERC proposed rule for expansion, he said.

But yet in the same article, another guy says, "It’s not because there aren’t investors ready to fund it."  So it's not a problem of lack of investment -- but let's give billions of our tax dollars to transmission investors?  Why?  Because they want to fill their pockets?  That's the only answer to this contradiction.  Investment tax credits for transmission are nothing but a give away.  They won't actually help transmission get built.  They will just help a handful of people to get rich trying.

And then there's this:

Congress needs to act to give a federal agency, either the Department of Energy or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), authority to site transmission lines. “They could pass a statute that’s about one page long,” Pierce told CNBC in a phone conversation at the end of May. “This is not hard to accomplish if you’ve got the political will.”
Pierce knows that there will be opposition to such a federal authority, to which he says: Too bad.
“You cannot allow the citizens of a single state to block actions that are imperative for the welfare of the citizens that the whole country much less can you can you afford to allow the citizens of one little town or one landowner to,” Pierce said. “It’s just frustrating."

Perhaps Pierce should ponder how frustrating it is for a farmer to have a portion of his business confiscated to build transmission lines from which he would receive no benefit when that transmission line could just as easily be sited on an existing road or rail right of way.  I'm pretty sure Pierce's "frustration" would pale in comparison.  Giving more power to the federal government has NEVER solved a political uprising, instead it exacerbates it.  Having federal authority to site gas pipelines certainly hasn't stopped grassroots opposition to them.  Too bad for Pierce... it's never going to happen.  The federal government only has power where states don't.  And states have power over electric transmission siting and permitting.

Again... why do this when the real solution is so much simpler?  Several contemporary examples prove that siting transmission underwater or on existing rail or road rights of way does not attract opposition.  SOO Green Renewable Rail.  Champlain Hudson Power Express.  Lake Erie Connector.  New England Clean Power Link.  Vermont Green Line.  Clean Path New York.  Need I go on?  These are the transmission projects that are sailing through siting and permitting because they don't require new rights of way and they don't impact host landowners or communities.

We've been beating this drum for several years now by sharing this idea any place we can.  Maybe some of these morons are starting to catch on, but prefer to pretend it was their own idea?

Also, Gramlich sees a potential path forward in upgrading existing transmission lines. There, you don’t have the siting battles. “Reconstructing or replacing the old lines with new lines is a is a major opportunity,” he told CNBC. “There’s very little public opposition to transmission over existing corridors.

Ding!  Ding!  Ding!  Ya think?  However, this is from the same guy who thinks we need transmission investment tax credits.  But, whatever.  The basic kernel of an idea has managed to squeeze its way into Rob's brain after running into his wall of resistance to new ideas.  Opposition doesn't form if you don't cause impacts.

Quit wasting time, energy, and money on stupid, ineffective ideas to quell opposition.  The only way to avoid opposition is to bury new transmission on existing rights of way.

Now get crackin'.  Time's a wasting.