Marketing to Mayberry 2022

It's no secret that the politicians currently in power and their deep pocketed owners are bellying up to the bar for a new transmission feeding frenzy.  But there's one thing standing in their way.  Y-O-U!  Despite a long string of failed transmission projects, such as PATH, MAPP, MCRP, RICL, WindCatcher, Project Verde, NECEC, Transource IEC, Plains & Eastern, Swepco Kings River, Western Carolinas Modernization Project, BPA I-5 Corridor, Northern Pass and many more I'm too busy to look up right now, these people think building a whole bunch more transmission is going to be a snap.

NOT!

They seem to think maybe they need a new approach because what they've been doing is not working (see list above).  People are still opposing new transmission rights of way across their properties, and these people are winning.  They discussed their new approach at a recent Advanced Energy Economy webinar this week. Here it is, courtesy of RTO Insider:

But building transmission, she said, “takes patient money” and “a deep engagement with many, many regulatory bodies” and stakeholders.
“The very big reality is, whether we’re doing a 100-mile [transmission] line or a 500-mile [transmission] line, pretty much anyone can stop it. You can have local jurisdiction, county jurisdiction, state jurisdiction. And you don’t typically have condemnation rights.”
Overcoming landowner opposition “takes a lot of engagement. It takes a lot of humility. You’ve got to talk to people from where they’re at. You can’t come in political. You can’t come in with preconceived ideas. You can’t come in even with the implicit idea that this is essential for the greater good. You have to come in, when you’re talking with landowners, profoundly respectful, that you may be dealing with heritage ranches that have been in families for over a century. And you need to be willing to sit down, listen, have hard conversations [and] follow up again.
“And then you have to work with their concerns. … They can say, ‘You know, I am protective of this particular view. Can you work on the routing around this precious part of the land for me?’ And so I think that that’s really the key to engagement.”
Webster said Pattern takes a broad view of its “host community.”
“You’re a host community if you’re hosting an actual facility with turbines or panels. You’re a host community if you’re hosting a substation, or a major piece of transmission infrastructure. But to us, you’re also a host community if you’re supporting the public good by allowing your transmission line to pass through your county or your property. And so we created standardized community benefits packages based on just mileage that [is] consistent across our entire footprint.”

Oh, humility.  Who do you think you're fooling, Pattern?  You used eminent domain to threaten landowners in New Mexico and you got that authority from the state's industry-funded "Renewable Energy Transmission Authority."  Pattern bought eminent domain authority.  Are you now suggesting that paying off a local government to look the other way while you condemn and acquire rights of way across privately owned land is "humility"?

And let's think about those "preconceived ideas" that are supposed to be left at the door, like "greater good" and politics.  They're not abandoning that nonsense, they just think landowners are too stupid to understand it.  It's not an understanding or education problem.  Landowners are far from stupid.  This is nothing more than 2022's version of Marketing to Mayberry, where failed transmission developer Clean Line Energy Partners hosted a conference that supposed developers needed to dumb down their spiel so hillbillies and hicks in the sticks would go for it.  That failed miserably.  Clean Line Energy Partners no longer exists.

Get real -- there's no respect when transmission developers are "negotiating" with landowners while holding the eminent domain card.  That's coercion.  The transmission developer is going to build the cheapest project it can and your view and your use of your own land doesn't matter.

Transmission is poised to fail again because the developers and the politicians STILL refuse to acknowledge the answer that's right in front of them.  Don't cause impacts.  Don't burden people's land.  If you don't do these things, landowners and local communities simply don't care.... build whatever you want!  There's a network of highways and rail that already connect our country, and new technology that allows HVDC to be buried in a narrow trench on these existing rights of way is readily available to those who want to use it.  Landowners know this, therefore they will NOT allow the continued destruction of rural places in the name of "clean energy" for parasitic places far, far away.

Real respect is burying your projects on existing rights of way and causing no impacts at all on "host communities."

Marketing to Mayberry failed before, and it will fail again.