Making Electricity Cheaper Through National Siting for Transmission Lines
How to Make Power Cheaper, Green, and More Reliable
Solar and wind energy production capacity are accelerating at a remarkable rate, which is good because more clean energy production increases the supply of electricity, bringing down costs for consumers, helping reduce carbon emissions, and fighting climate change.
There’s a problem though. The places where it makes the most sense to build a lot of this new green energy are frequently not close to the places where people want to consume that electricity.
Here’s a map of solar energy potential in the United States. Parts of the Southwest are solar bonanza but, except for Phoenix and Las Vegas, there aren’t many cities there. The electricity that solar energy creates needs to be moved to elsewhere in the country.
Here’s a map of wind energy potential in the United States. It’s strongest in the Great Plains. Again, that’s an incredible resource but there aren’t many cities there. The electricity it creates will need to be transmitted across significant distances to other parts of the country.
Great News on Green Energy Production, But Transmission is the Achilles Heel
What we need are high-capacity electricity transmission lines to efficiently move that electricity. And we need a lot of them.
The United States currently has about 150 million MW-miles of transmission capacity in operation today; we probably need another 100 to 120 million MW-miles installed to meet the forecasted surge in electricity demand. Unfortunately, our current approach of state-by-state transmission planning and permitting is not on track to deliver.
The benefits of a different approach could be enormous. Compared to our current approach, inter-state coordination and transmission expansion could cut the cost of delivering green energy by up to 46%. Better inter-regional electricity connections — so that the United States has a truly national electrical system — could save American consumers $47 billion annually.
In particular, high-capacity transmission delivers great efficiency. As this graphic from Americans for a Clean Energy Grid shows, one 765 kilovolt (kV) has a cost per unit of capacity that is less than a quarter of what 230 kV can deliver; its higher voltage means there’s less load loss, and it takes up far less right-of-way space than smaller capacity transmission.
The problem is that the construction of high-capacity transmission lines is rapidly going down rather than up. In the first half of the 2010s, the United States was constructing 1700 miles of high-capacity lines per year. In the second half of the 2010s, we were building 645 miles per year. In 2022, we built a paltry 198 miles. It’s worth noting that, as you can see in the chart below, the permitting time is actually longer than the construction time. In other words, it takes longer to get permission to build these lines than it does to actually build them.
We need to do better on this. Now.
If we don’t, electricity will be more expensive, less reliable, and dirtier than it needs to be.
P is for Persistent Permitting Problem
The Three P’s of electricity transmission are planning, paying, and permitting. Earlier this month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) took a major stride on planning and paying. It passed Order 1920 which, in the words of Breakthrough Energy, “might be considered the most significant regulatory milestone concerning interstate power lines in nearly three decades.
Like the transformative Order 888 that mandated open access to the power grid in 1996, this new rule promises to redefine the future of America’s energy infrastructure.” Order 1920 updates cost allocation rules and regional transmission planning. FERC, and the Biden administration appointees who made the key votes to get these orders passed, deserve a lot of credit for this.
Unfortunately, permitting remains a major challenge. The process for approving the construction of those high-capacity lines is a labyrinthine mess.
Every state has its own set of siting and permitting requirements, its own set of zoning and land use ordinances, its own eminent domain rules, and its own environmental laws, which means that energy companies have to try to navigate a tangled, inconsistent, often contradictory maze of rules to build interstate high-capacity transmission lines. Another thing that FERC could do to help here is it could amend the way that it sets rates of return so that utilities would be more strongly incentivized to upgrade existing transmission lines to be higher capacity.
Multiple studies by the Department of Energy, FERC, and independents researchers show that this patchwork of regulations adds considerable complexity, time, and costs to building these transmission lines. They impede reliability improvements and that’s a big problem because electricity outages are higher now than at any point in the last 20 years. They also open up opportunities for local political obstruction, inhibit interstate cooperation, and make financing more difficult because they add so much uncertainty.
One might be forgiven for assuming “that’s just how it is, we can’t do it differently.” But that’s not true. We can do it differently and we already do it differently…when it comes to natural gas pipelines.
Unlike with high-capacity electricity transmission lines, FERC oversees a centralized process for siting interstate natural gas pipelines. This helps streamline and expedite construction, and federal eminent domain laws apply, so it is much easier to acquire right-of-way. Without this system, the natural gas boom unleashed by hydraulic fracturing would have been largely moot.
Here you can see a map of all the natural gas pipelines in the United States. The dark blue ones are interstate pipelines. We need to do for high-capacity electricity lines what we already do for natural gas, make it easier to build them across state lines.
We Already Have an Interstate System for Moving Cars, Let’s Put the Interstate System for Moving Electricity On Top of It
To put it bluntly, we need Congress to overhaul electricity permitting and place it fully under FERC’s jurisdiction. Some areas of policy are of such national importance that we do not allow state-level preferences to stand in the way of what’s best for the country as a whole. Electricity transmission, like natural gas transmission, should be understood as one of those policy areas.
While Congress is working on that overhaul, one way the federal government could try for an early harvest version of this national siting would be to try to co-locate as much of this new high-capacity electrical transmission as possible along interstate highways, which the federal government already has significant power over through the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).
Notice too that a 765 kV line only needs 200 feet of right of way.
That makes them much easier to place along interstate highways than the 900 feet of right of way needed by six 345 kV lines. Co-locating them along interstate highways would have the added benefit of enabling more Level 3 Direct Current Fast Charging (DCFC) stations for electric vehicles.
It bears repeating, again and again, that building these new high-capacity transmission lines is not just the green thing to do. By increasing the supply of electricity, it will make electricity more affordable for consumers and for business.
Both the far left and the far right want to argue that there is a choice that we as a society have to make between energy that is cheap and reliable and energy that is green. The far left wants to make this argument because they think that people should be willing to make sacrifices for the sake of mitigating climate change. The far right wants to make that argument because they think it will turn people off from supporting green energy. They’re both wrong.
The choice between electricity that is cheap and reliable versus electricity that is green is a false choice. Upgrading high-capacity electricity transmission lines can make our electricity cheaper, more reliable, and greener.
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