As clean energy sources are increasingly added to the grid and energy demand rises, the transmission systems that carry electricity from where it’s generated to where it’s used must be transformed. A modernized and expanded grid not only ensures we can connect new renewable energy sources to communities across the country, but also helps us meet rising energy demand reliably and affordably. Transmission reform is a key step to meet our climate goals and ensure a just transition to a clean energy economy.
We invited a panel of speakers to explore how we need to rethink electricity transmission to create a future with a livable climate, a reliable grid, and affordable energy. Our expert speakers included Alice Madden, Senior Director of Climate Strategy at National Audubon Society; Beverly Bendix, Manager, Carbon-Free Electricity at RMI; and Anjali Patel, Vice President for Clean Energy at David Gardiner and Associates and Consultant for Americans for a Clean Energy Grid.
In this recap article, we’ll provide highlights from our expert’s presentations, including the role of transmission in meeting clean energy goals, the challenges our grid faces, the benefits of regional transmission planning, successful case studies, and the power states hold in transmission reform.
Alice Madden, National Audubon Society
Alice Madden is the Senior Director of Climate Strategies for the National Audubon Society, where she oversees efforts to achieve the organization’s strategic goal of influencing the rapid and responsible onboarding of 100GWs of clean energy and additional transmission. Alice’s many previous roles include serving in the Colorado House of Representatives as Majority Leader, as Climate Change Advisor to Governor Bill Ritter, and as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Intergovernmental and External Affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as various positions at the Center for American Progress, University of Colorado’s School of Public Affairs and School of Law, and Greenpeace.
Why Transmission Matters for Climate and Conservation Progress
It’s no surprise that climate and conservation go hand in hand — Audubon’s science shows that two thirds of all North American bird species are at risk of extinction from climate change. Audubon recognizes that climate action requires decarbonization, and as such, has made a commitment to get involved with the rapid and responsible deployment of 100 GWs of utility-scale renewable energy generation and transmission. While there are plenty of renewable energy projects ready to go across the country, these projects often sit for at least six years in the “interconnection queue” waiting to connect to the power grid. In order to get these projects deployed and meet decarbonization goals, we need to at least double or triple the grid’s capacity.
This is where transmission comes in. There are three main segments of the electric grid system:
- Generation, where large power plants convert renewables, natural gas, and other fuels into electricity.
- Transmission, where this power moves across long distances to the areas where people need it.
- Distribution, where this power is finally disbursed to homes, businesses, schools, and any other places that use electricity.
We need a massive overhaul in the capacity of the transmission system in order to carry the power from new renewable energy sources to where it’s needed, but we are far behind on that progress.
The Challenges our Grid Faces
There are several issues with our current grid, starting with the fact that our current system is old and fragmented. The average age of transmission lines is 40 years, with a quarter of lines over 50 years old. We have three separate grid systems in the mainland United States, spanning 12 distinct planning regions, and these regions are not well connected, nor do they communicate often or effectively.
The system is also obsolete — it was designed for large, centralized power sources, such as coal plants, that are near urban areas where the power will be used. This is in stark contrast from the more widely distributed utility-scale renewable projects that we need to build, which cannot necessarily be sited near the places where the power will be used.
As previously mentioned, the planning, permitting, and construction of transmission lines is also a slow process, taking an average of seven years for a project. However, that seven years reflects progress to date, much of which has focused on building low-voltage lines within one state. There have been few incentives to promote long-term interregional planning, which would support sharing power across state lines and thereby improve reliability and rescue costs to ratepayers.
Audubon’s Transmission Policy Priorities
We can start to tackle transmission challenges by doing as much as we can with the lines we have already. We need to modernize our existing grid and maximize transmission line efficiency through grid-enhancing technologies (GETs). Audubon has also focused on maximizing co-location and the use of existing rights of way, such as building transmission lines on highways, to reduce the amount of land and environmental damage needed to site the lines (see the work of NextGen Highways for more information on national and state efforts related to this issue).
Audubon is also investing in defense against federal rollbacks, especially with a change in federal administration, as well as closely monitoring permitting reform and submitting comments on all relevant proposed rules. Another key area of focus is support for interregional planning and resource sharing. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the independent agency that regulates transmission, finalized Order 1920 earlier this year, which promotes long-term interregional planning. States can coordinate with their utilities and other transmission entities to push for this work.
It’s also essential to engage with developers and decision-makers to ensure best practices for siting and operations. Audubon plays an interesting role here in advocating for both birds and for the climate. Transmission structures have very low rates of causing bird mortality, and Audubon doesn’t want to be the reason why transmission siting is being further delayed. Of course, impacts on birds are only one piece of the puzzle, and Audubon works to encourage broad outreach to affected communities, early Tribal consultation, and data-informed mapping processes to avoid, minimize, and mitigate impacts on all species. These best practices actually help hasten permitting and avoid lawsuits down the line.
Lastly, it’s extremely important to work with states to develop and strengthen transmission entities. Across the country, there are around a dozen state-level transmission authorities, but only a couple are directed toward strategic planning and rapid deployment of transmission systems, both in their own and neighboring states. Two great examples of this are New Mexico’s Renewable Energy Transmission Authority and Colorado’s Electric Transmission Authority.
Successful Case Studies: Pattern Energy and MISO
The SunZia line provides an interesting case study where Audubon worked with a developer to build out transmission quickly while prioritizing input from environmental organizations. The SunZia line, which will deliver 4500 MW of wind energy from New Mexico to Arizona and California, has been stuck in the planning process for 18 years. The original developer wasn’t working with affected communities, Tribes, and other stakeholders, but when Pattern Energy took over, it openly sought input from conservation organizations and was able to start construction.
Audubon worked to provide guidance on best practices for design and siting, and acted as a convener and liaison for other environmental NGOs. Audubon also presented on the impacts of different route alternatives to leadership at the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management, helping to advance the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) permitting process. In the end, Pattern Energy made several voluntary commitments that supported climate and environmental priorities, including using bird-diverting technologies on high-risk portions of the line, co-locating the line along existing rights of way, funding conservation research, and more.
Today, Audubon is partnering with Pattern Energy to create Developer Best Practices, utilizing Southern Spirit, a proposed line running from Texas through Louisiana and Mississippi, as a working model.
Another interesting case study relates to the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which is one of the more organized regions in terms of building transmission, operating in the Midwest. In 2022, they announced a $10 billion investment for 2,000 miles of new transmission lines, 80 percent of which are planned along existing rights of way. Projects with brand-new lines require direct engagement with affected communities to ensure responsible construction. Audubon is working directly with developers to build support for these lines while utilizing refined mapping tools to advise developers on siting practices that effectively avoid and minimize impacts on the environment. This helps set these projects up for rapid deployment while reducing conflict later, in a true win-win-win for developers, communities, and the planet.
Beverly Bendix, RMI
Bev is a Manager in RMI’s electricity practice. Her work focuses on unlocking solutions for equitably and affordably building the transmission needed to support our rapidly changing energy system. She has over a decade of experience in electricity in both the private sector and state government. She holds a bachelor’s in Environmental Science from RPI and a master’s in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon.
The Benefits of Proactive Regional Transmission Planning: Reliability and Beyond
RMI’s Clean Competitive Grids team works to ensure transmission supports the energy transition. Much of this work focuses on proactive solutions at the regional or interregional level, rather than a bottoms-up approach where each utility system plans separately. FERC’s Order 1920, finalized earlier this year, requires this sort of proactive regional transmission planning — and this has many benefits, including reducing generation costs, energy waste, and electricity congestion, alongside various benefits directly tied to meeting energy demand and ensuring grid reliability.
Proactive regional transmission planning helps to more efficiently meet demand and maintain reliability, without overbuilding generation in multiple different utility territories. If states and regions can share power across borders, we can ensure grid reliability when one area has less available electricity and another has more than they need, lowering costs at the same time.
Ensuring grid reliability also means lowering overall costs of generating electricity, and better regional planning supports more affordable solutions to meeting energy demand. If we can optimize how energy is dispatched across regions, we can utilize cheaper energy sources while lowering overall costs of electricity generation.
Proactive planning can additionally help to bolster the grid’s resilience in the case of extreme weather events, minimizing impacts on electricity delivery and ensuring greater systemwide reliability.
Lastly, regional and interregional transmission planning can help to meet peak power demand by moving energy across borders where it’s needed most. This reduces the need for investment in power plants that exist solely to meet peak demand — which are generally gas-powered.
Illustrative Research: Regional Transmission in the West
Across the country, but especially in the West, we’re seeing a major increase in electricity demand coupled with fast-approaching clean energy targets, which will make up over 90 percent of Western energy demand by 2050. RMI conducted an analysis looking into the value of regional planning compared to isolated planning to meet 100 percent clean energy goals by running energy models for individual states in isolation versus states as a pair attempting to meet energy demand.
Challenges to meeting energy demand are rapidly changing. In the past, the major period where the grid was most challenged was peak load, which is the highest amount of electricity demand that the system is going to face at once. Today, this issue is slightly different — the challenge is to meet peak net load, which is the amount of peak demand that remains after accounting for variable sources on the grid like solar and wind, a number that is a bit lower than traditional peak load.
However, the issue that planners will encounter moving forward is meeting peak demand during periods where variable resources like wind and solar are low — when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. During extended periods where this results in a significant in-state energy deficit, supplementing with battery storage alone is not sufficient with current battery technology. In these situations, we need to fill the gap with “clean firm” technologies like nuclear, geothermal, and existing fossil fuels plants with carbon capture and storage retrofits.
RMI found that regional transmission, which allows for energy flow across borders, reduces the need for clean firm technologies by harnessing energy diversity from other areas. For example, during an extended period where Nevada has drastically low in-state solar production, regional transmission could allow for Colorado to supplement that need for energy with its own solar or wind, reducing the need for reliance on clean firm power. RMI’s analysis looked at Nevada and Colorado as isolated versus paired states, and found that regional transmission allows both states to reduce the need for clean firm power, leveraging more low-cost solar, wind, and storage to save 15 percent of costs to ratepayers.
RMI conducted this sort of analysis across 55 pairs of states in the West and found that the greater the geographical distance between states, the greater the cost savings. For example, one of the state pairs with the highest cost savings is Washington and New Mexico — Washington’s hydropower complements New Mexico’s solar and wind. Greater interconnectivity directly translates to improved reliability and reduced costs.
The Role of States in Transmission
There are many actors across the transmission landscape, and one key player is the Public Utility Commission (PUC), sometimes also called the Public Service Commission (PSC). Depending on whether a state is part of a regional transmission organization (RTO), and whether it has an integrated resource planning process with PUC approval involved, there are various levels of power a PUC has over transmission.
Generally, state regulators have four main levers they can pull in relation to transmission. One of the most important levers is the power to engage with their regional planning entity, including current state engagement with compliance on FERC Order 1920. One example of this soft power is in the West, where commissioners have convened a transmission collaborative within their existing regional coordinating bodies, known as the Western Interstate Energy Board. Multiple commissioners signed and sent a letter highlighting transmission as a concern, giving the issue much more weight.
Another lever present in some states is a permitting approval process known as a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity (CPCN), which states can utilize to support or oppose certain projects. Similarly, Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs) provide another way for states to push for transmission planning, however most states don’t significantly address transmission in IRPs, nor do many states require PUC approval or review of IRPs. Lastly, state regulators can set retail rates, although most states have these rates set at the federal level by FERC.
Anjali Patel, David Gardiner and Associates, Americans for a Clean Energy Grid
Anjali Patel is the Vice President for Clean Energy with David Gardiner and Associates (DGA). She leads DGA’s work to help Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG) expand long-distance transmission to support reliable, resilient, and more affordable energy. Anjali also focuses on providing companies, organizations, and governments with strategic guidance on policies that are needed to support decarbonizing the energy, transportation, and building sectors. Prior to joining DGA, Anjali spent over a decade providing litigation and transactional services on administrative, electric, gas, renewable energy, and transportation law issues. Anjali earned a J.D. from the University of Michigan, an M.S. in Environmental Policy from Drexel University, and a B.A. in Biology and Environmental Studies from Case Western Reserve University.
Energy Demand is Exponentially Increasing
Electricity is part of almost every aspect of our lives —impacting our safety, health, and economic opportunities — which means it must be affordable. Transmission is a key component of ensuring energy affordability, especially as energy demand has been increasing exponentially. From 2022 to 2023, grid planners nearly doubled their five-year forecasts for energy demand, with expanding data centers, manufacturing, and industrial facilities as some of the main drivers. From the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we’ve seen over $175 billion in new investment in battery manufacturing, electric vehicle components and assembly, and associated supply chain projects.
Data centers especially are set to place an even greater strain on our grid, as they’re doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the amount of energy demand in a state. Some states like Virginia are predicting that data centers will become half of their electric load. These aren’t only tied to large technology companies running their own systems like Google, Meta, and Intel, but also for essential services like hospital records, banking, and cybersecurity.
Unfortunately, we don’t have sufficient energy available to support the integration of all of these facilities, in large part because we don’t have sufficient transmission capacity to move electricity from where it’s generated to where it’ll be used. This can have economic impacts related to businesses’ decisions on where to locate their facilities and whether to build in the U.S. or abroad.
Transmission as a Key to Energy Affordability
Transmission modernization requires significant investment, and these costs are borne by ratepayers. One key aspect of energy affordability, as it relates to transmission, is the cost of not investing, which over time can be even greater than the cost of the original investment. For example, winter storms Uri and Elliot in 2021 and 2022 caused significant damage and rolling blackouts in the regions they hit. When Uri hit various parts of the midwest, states were able to import power from other regions and avoid rolling blackouts, but when Uri hit Texas, the state’s lack of interregional transmission lines prevented this. When Elliot hit the mid-Atlantic and the southeast, the southeast had rolling blackouts. Studies have since shown that had we invested in one transmission line between Texas and the southeast, it could have yielded a billion dollars in value to Texas during Uri’s duration, and another $95 million going toward the southeast during Elliot’s duration — in addition to saving lives and protecting health and safety.
Transmission investment is seen as a charge on ratepayers’ bills, but as transmission capacity increases, the cost of power goes down, as it leads to the interconnection of cheaper, cleaner resources. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently published a National Transmission Planning Study showing hundreds of billions of dollars of net benefits from large-scale transmission development through 2050. They also found that incremental transmission investments would be offset by reduced fuel generation and storage costs, yielding $1.60 to $1.80 for every dollar spent on transmission, resulting in real savings for ratepayers.
What Does a Well-Planned Transmission System Look Like?
As previously mentioned, we need to plan proactively rather than reactively. Right now, many regions are still planning for potential reliability violations that have happened in the past or that may happen in the near term, rather than looking at what our system needs to look like in the future. Transmission lines are 40 to 50 year-long assets, and we must make sure we can maximize the use of those assets moving forward in the short and long term. This means looking more comprehensively at demand forecasts, including expected electrification and data center manufacturing demands that will increase loads, and looking into what generation sources will be retiring.
We also need to look at both expansion and modernization opportunities within the transmission grid. Expanding the capacity of our existing grid can involve grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) and advanced reconductoring, but it must also be complemented with building out new lines.
Lastly, we need federal and state policies that support comprehensive transmission buildout, streamlining siting and permitting by reducing bureaucratic inefficiencies while respecting community and environmental protections. NIMBY-ism (Not In My Backyard) is a big reason why many lines don’t get built, so it’s critical to help communities understand the purpose of the line while also ensuring they can meaningfully participate in the process and receive benefits from the project.
Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG) recently released a report outlining state transmission policies supported by transmission modernization and expansion experts. Next year, ACEG will be releasing a report on best practices for strategic community engagement, developed through conversations with a diverse set of stakeholders, including transmission developers, environmental justice organizations, Indigenous groups, labor advocates, and others. The Fact Sheet for that report is already available.
Visit ACEG’s Publications and Fact Sheets Page for more resources on transmission, including fact sheets on various issues being brought before Congress, regional fact sheets for FERC Order 1920, and other reports.
Q&A
Q: What causes the interconnection delay, and how much can we actually speed that up?
Anjali Patel: It depends on the region, different regions have different reasons for interconnection delays. For many regions, it’s the way that the interconnection queue, which is the line for new generators, is processed, and how they’re processing them. Some regions we’re processing based on “First In, First Out,” so if you’re the first generator to come and say you want an interconnection right, you may take a while to get processed — so the person behind you is waiting until all your paperwork, all your analyses and studies are done. Some regions are changing, though. PJM filed for changes to their process because they found that was holding up the line quite a bit. In other regions, there isn’t sufficient transmission capacity to put generators online, and that’s increasing network costs, which are the costs when you have to upgrade a line to add more capacity; you might need to upgrade not just the interconnection point, but the transmission line itself. And so those costs have really been rising across the U.S. Lawrence Berkeley Lab has done a number of studies on interconnection costs and found that they’re getting so exorbitant that developers can’t do it; it’s just not penciling out anymore for their projects. So again, it depends on the region, but those are two of the biggest issues in some areas. There’s also Alice’s comment about how business models don’t help. Utilities are often not supportive of building generation sources, especially in areas that are vertically integrated, and the utilities own generation, transmission, and their distribution lines. They don’t want competition in that area.
Q: How do the results of recent elections impact the future of transmission?
Alice Madden: I’ll say that we probably need to rethink how we talk about this a little differently. You know, we’re all here because we care about climate, but we can start talking about reliability, job creation, you know, being ready to onboard these massive new energy needs that we heard about today. So just thinking more in terms of a sustainable economy versus a sustainable environment. It’s kind of sad, but I would say, just make sure you realize who you’re talking to and adjust your messaging accordingly. I think transmission will still progress; energy and electricity needs can still make a lot of progress. We really do need that. The price of oil is low right now; there are going to be market reasons to keep building renewables. So I think we just keep our chins up and keep moving forward.
Bev Bendix: I’ll throw in one more bipartisan point, which is one thing we’ve seen in our work in the West, is that there are actually regions in the West that can’t build manufacturing facilities that they want to because there is not sufficient grid infrastructure to even support the electricity needed. So I think there are a lot of reasons that transmission can be a bipartisan issue.
Anjali Patel: Our hope is that FERC Order 1920 continues to move forward, and compliance continues to move forward. What FERC Order 1920 outlined is best practices in transmission planning, and regardless of whether or not it comes from the federal government, the regional entities and states can still push for best practices in transmission planning. So, having states really take an active role in ensuring that we’re building transmission collaboratively across states, not just within their state, and that they’re creating these integrated networks, is going to continue to be just as important as action at the federal level.
Bev Bendix: I want to make one point that sort of addresses some of the points that were made in the [written] Q&A. I don’t think the question is do we need proactive transmission planning or do we need distributed energy resources? I think we need both. What you’re really coming down to, I think, the more negative way to look at it is — transmission or new gas plants. That is really the fight that we’re fighting in many instances, especially with load growth.
Conclusion
Transmission reform that includes both expansion and modernization and focuses on long-term, proactive planning across states and regions is essential for our future. It’s key to meeting our climate and clean energy goals, but it’s also an essential part of affordably meeting rising energy demand. States can continue to advocate for transmission reform, both through engagement with federal transmission regulations and through promoting long-term regional transmission planning at their state PUCs or transmission authorities.
Regardless of climate progress in the wake of recent federal and state elections, transmission must be a key part of an energy future that is clean, reliable, and affordable, and states will continue to play an essential role.
