BiGS Actionable Intelligence:
BOSTON—The future of clean energy in America depends on how quickly we can grow the transmission systems that make power available nationwide. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates these systems must grow by at least 60 percent by 2030 to meet clean energy goals.
The story on the ground is even more complicated.
The pace of building high-voltage transmission lines in the U.S. each year has declined, falling from an annual average of 2,000 miles between 2012 and 2016 to just 700 miles between 2017 and 2021.
Why is that? In a June 2024 report, Harvard University Professor Stephen Ansolabehere and a team of researchers found that one reason the U.S. grid expansion isn’t happening fast enough is because the players involved aren’t listening to the local communities that are often most affected.
The result: Conflicts, protracted delays, and higher costs.
Insight from the report
Ansolabehere is an author of Crossed Wires, a report by Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, and the Roosevelt Project at the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research that provided some insight. Consider how long it took for three major long-distance transmission line projects studied in different parts of the U.S. to win approval, according to the study. “It took 15 years not to build it, just to get through the permitting process, just to get to the part where you could start to build it,” Ansolabehere told a panel during Harvard Climate Action Week in June.
“The listening process broke down in every instance where things failed,” Ansolabehere told the audience, adding that companies and government entities like public utility commissions tended to view public engagement as “a box to be checked rather than an opportunity to improve their projects.”
Brakes and accelerators
Energy development in the U.S. typically involves a combination of brakes and accelerators, Ansolabehere said, noting that it’s important to understand both.
“A lot of the discussion that I hear about climate change tends to dismiss the brakes, and dismiss the people who are slowing down the changes that need to happen because there’s a moral imperative to achieve something,” he said. However, he added, the brakes provide an opportunity to listen, which in turn is the key to accelerating the process.
“I’ve always liked to say that God gave us two ears and one mouth to use in that proportion, but unfortunately it’s often the reverse,” said Ernest Moniz, the secretary of energy in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2017.
The timing of community engagement is a critical factor, Moniz said, noting that this step often does not happen until a project is considered “baked.” But, he said, “social equity issues absolutely require early engagement with communities and listening.”
While the Salata Institute-Roosevelt Project report took a broad, analytical look at various aspects of the U.S. transmission grid, a companion report called How Grid Projects Get Stuck compiled case studies on four projects. That included the three that each took 15 years to reach project approval in New England, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest.
Yet a fourth case study showed something different.
This case study examined the Texas Competitive Renewable Electricity Zone (CREZ), a system of multiple transmission lines connecting wind resources in West Texas to the state’s largest population centers. While not perfect, the CREZ process involved much more community education than the other projects, was more transparent and gave people the chance to make comments that could lead to improvement, according to the report. In the end, the approval process took about 10 years instead of 15.
“Texas built more transmission capacity in a shorter time and with more public input than did any of the other regions we examined,” the report says. From 2006 to 2019, it says, the CREZ transmission lines accounted for 23% of all new high-voltage lines placed into service nationwide.
Why transmission matters
A robust grid will be more necessary than ever in the coming years, as the country increasingly turns to renewable sources like solar and wind, which tend to be generated farther away from power-hungry cities than coal- or gas-fired plants.
Transmission lines are needed not only to electrify more areas of the economy but to feed the growing appetite for electricity for data centers serving artificial intelligence and other technology needs, Moniz said. Some utilities are already revising their load growth forecasts exponentially to accommodate AI infrastructure and new manufacturing facilities, he said.
Moniz also says there are “wild cards” that may not be anticipated. “We don’t know whether there’s going to be, say in 10 years, a big hydrogen industry,” he said. If the country begins to produce green hydrogen, an energy-intensive process that uses electrolysis to split water molecules, on a large scale, that could require massive amounts of new renewable electricity.
In short, Moniz and Ansolabehere agree that the process of building long-distance transmission lines needs to get unstuck. While that is starting to happen on the legislative and regulatory side, the issue of public engagement still falls short.
Particularly challenging are projects in which proposed transmission lines would cut across states without providing electricity to those states. Even if these projects may be important on a regional or national level, Moniz said, “You often have a situation where the local communities just don’t see the value to them.”
“Rather than complain about it,” he added, “I think we have to recognize these are legitimate concerns that we need to address.”
One factor that often complicates the debate over transmission projects, Ansolabehere said, is the lack of a trusted source of information. Faced with competing allegations from developers and opponents, citizens and even municipal leaders often don’t know what to believe. State governments, he said, can often fill in this gap and serve as a clearinghouse of information about proposed projects.
Moniz also highlighted the need for community benefit plans with “hard commitments” negotiated up front, as well as incentives for labor agreements related to construction projects, as a way to build local support.
“This idea that clean energy transition, energy security, and social equity are one conversation is actually seeping into the process,” he said. “I wish it were faster. I wish it had happened 10 years ago. But we are where we are, and hopefully, as we turn into the next decade, we’re going to see the fruits of a lot of these initiatives.”