The United States desperately needs new power lines.

Our transmission standstill has a number of consequences. First of all, it raises consumer prices. As this post at CanaryMedia makes clear, bad transmission hasn’t raised utility bills despite generation being cheaper than ever.

A 2018 report by the nonprofit Americans for a Clean Energy Grid identified 22 shovel-ready projects that had been in existence for a decade or more. To get such projects off the ground, the report’s authors suggested streamlining project siting and permitting, passing a tax credit for transmission projects, and direct investment by the federal government. 

Despite recent noise from the Biden administration about speeding up the sitting process, the same problems are still knocking off and slowing down transition projects. 

The most recent and notable example is that of the Grain Belt Express. The transmission line, which would span nearly 800 miles across four midwest states, from Kansas to Indiana, connecting into the PJM Interconnection LLC grid, is at risk of being thwarted by House Bill 2005. The bill, brainchild of big ag groups across the region, would give any county in the line’s path the right to block construction. 

The project represents a special economic opportunity for the region’s rural communities which have struggled in recent times. The cheap wind power would provide significant savings to the small municipalities. What’s more, emissions would be brought down as well. 

Cumbersome regulations and NIMBYISM are mostly to blame for the nation’s stagnant transmission system.

The same article includes quotes from advocates of bill 2005: ‘“Grain Belt is currently working towards condemning our land,” Henke said in written testimony. “They have told us they will not negotiate with us and the price they tell us is what we get. This line will take out our shade trees in our pastures and cut through several fences. They are not willing to move the line at all to avoid some of these things that will greatly impact our farm.”’

I don’t want to completely disregard people like Henke’s misgivings, but no decision comes without a cost. At some point, we’re going to have to accept some of the costs associated with big transmission projects to reap the important benefits: Cheaper, cleaner electricity.

A subsidiary of one of the largest U.S. providers of renewable energy pleaded guilty to criminal charges and was ordered to pay over $8 million in fines and restitution after at least 150 eagles were killed at its wind farms in eight states, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy was also sentenced to five years probation after being charged with three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act during a court appearance in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The charges arose from the deaths of nine eagles at three wind farms in Wyoming and New Mexico.

Invenergy spokesman Patrick Whitty slammed the House bill, calling it “an astonishing move in the wrong direction” at a time when global energy is in a security crisis.

“Among its many other impacts, the bill would unconstitutionally and retroactively kill Missouri’s largest energy infrastructure project, the Grain Belt Express, a project essential to American energy security that will connect millions of consumers to domestically produced, affordable, and reliable clean energy,” Whitty said. “The energy from the Grain Belt Express is the equivalent of 15 million barrels of oil annually, produced and delivered right here in the Midwest.”

The Missouri Supreme Court earlier ruled that Grain Belt be granted public utility status because the $2.3 billion project is in the public interest.

The project also has garnered the support of Sen. Bill White, R-Joplin, who says it will invest millions of dollars in the state’s rural areas, boost the local energy supply and help ensure energy independence.

White said Monday he had not yet reviewed the latest House bill, which moved out of the House last week on a 102-41 vote. But, he said retroactively targeting the company after it has already started buying land would be unconstitutional.

Labor unions, environmental groups and the Missouri Association of Municipal Utilities oppose the changes.

Jake Hummel, a former state senator from St. Louis who now oversees the Missouri AFL-CIO, said the project will create jobs as it crosses the property of 570 landowners in eight northern counties.
“The quest for American-made energy, while creating 1,500 Missouri jobs, is an opportunity our state cannot afford to pass up,” Hummel said.

Michael Berg of the Sierra Club’s Missouri chapter said the legislation is short-sighted in a time when energy production is evolving.
“More legal barriers for wind energy transmission give an unfair advantage to the highly polluting fossil fuel industry,” Berg told members of the House Judiciary Committee.
In addition, Berg said more than a dozen communities have signed up to purchase power from the line, including Kirkwood, Columbia, Hannibal and Farmington.
“The power delivered along this line is expected to save dozens of rural Missouri communities more than $12 million annually,” Berg said.
As an added benefit, Invenergy says it will use the power lines to also offer broadband service that could bring improved internet to over one million rural Missourians, including 250,000 within 50 miles of the transmission line.

In between posts selling anti-wind yard signs and posts about public meetings opposing local wind projects, there were posts that spread false, misleading and questionable information about wind energy.

NPR sent Facebook a sampling of the posts from anti-renewable community pages. Facebook spokesman Kevin McAlister said in an emailed statement, "We take action against content that our fact-checking partners rate false as part of our comprehensive strategy to keep viral, provably false claims from spreading on our apps. The examples shared with us don't appear to meet that threshold as they have only even been shared a handful of times over a period of several years."

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

“I caution you about averages,” Schug said. “Our extremes are much higher.”

Wayne Schug, MISO’s vice president of strategy and business development, said a growing renewables fleet and rapidly changing weather is driving increasing volatility and an “inability to deal with it.”  

By 2030, as little as 57% of the RTO’s fleet could be dispatchable, staff said. Dispatchable resources accounted for 84% of the fleet in 2020.

Schug said that since 2017, average daily output swings and forecasting errors have grown by gigawatts and percentages points, respectively. He said while the grid operator continues to get better at output forecasting, the expanding wind fleet has blotted out any signs of improvement.

Moeller said that for three days in 2020, MISO’s entire wind fleet in the upper Midwest failed to generate a megawatt. He also said unexpected cloud cover could make a solar farm “disappear within three minutes.”

Joundi said MISO is working with an aging generation fleet more prone to outages with increasingly uncertain return-to-service dates. He said the footprint’s current rate of generation retirement — propelled, in part, by state and federal policies — is outpacing members’ capacity replacements.
Staff expects the number of emergency near-misses to rise every year, Joundi said.

Joundi said that the control room now manages more intra-hour instability and intensifying “wind droughts,” where wind output drops off below forecasts.

Director Mark Johnson asked staff to invite a control room operator to a board meeting to address their recent experiences dealing with grid volatility.

“We face a rapidly transforming energy landscape,” CEO John Bear told directors during a Board Week meeting, warning of a delicate load-supply balance.

He said when MISO introduced its ancillary services market 12 years ago, “load was the only thing that was moving around.”
“Everything else was pretty static and predictable,” Bear said. “Where we stand is not sustainable, and it’s not safe. We have a lot of work in front of us.”  

Agri-Pulse Communications, Inc. is pleased to lead a webinar to discuss how expanding, integrating, and modernizing the North American high-voltage grid can drive rural economic development. Speakers will highlight the good-paying jobs that expanding high-voltage transmission will create, in addition to improved electricity affordability, reliability and sustainability.

What do the structures look like? The structures will be lattice steel designs. The structure base will have four legs approximately 40 feet by 40 feet wide. The structures will be between 130 to 160 feet tall.

What is the footprint of the structures?
The footprint of each structure is less than 1% of the easement area. Each of the structure’s four legs will have a cylindrical cement foundation that is around 4 to 6 feet wide and about 15 feet deep. These dimensions will vary somewhat based on localized soil conditions.

...providing new opportunities to local communities along the route

Structure Payments In addition to easement payments, you will be compensated for any structures on your property. You can elect an upfront, lump sum payment of $18,000 per structure, or receive annual payments starting at $1,500 per-structure in Year 1 and escalating at 2% each year as long as the structures are on your property.

Brown said the roads would not take the wear and tear that building a wind farm would entail, as they aren’t traveling in with heavy loads such as big wind turbines. He said the transmission stations will be brought in pieces and put together on site.

Brown also assured commissioners that the easement talks were peaceful and so far only a handful of requests have gone to court.
“We don’t want to use imminent domain,” he said. “We don’t want to use attorneys, we would rather have a conversation with landowners.”

... only a handful of requests have gone to court.

“Eminent Domain is something of a last resort used here,” Pnazek said. “In Kansas and Missouri to date, Invenergy has signed up about 65% of the affected parcels on a voluntary basis, and those are the approach that we’d be taking here as well as we progress the project through Illinois.”

Brown also told commissioners that there need not be concern over pushy land agents, stating that Invenergy hires reputable and credible agents but told the commissioners to contact him with any concerns.

"...and just in case some people want them underground your government and transmission companies will have a full array of irrational arguments and inflated costs to make sure nothing gets buried."

Environmentalists are associated with compensation packages; marginalized groups are associated with undergrounding and combined remediation; and environmentalists, the federal government, and the breadth of coalition actors is associated with the combined remediation outcome.

However, opponents often have differentiated goals, and a just outcome for one member of a coalition may be unjust for another.

Developers often determine the dimensions of the project, such as route options, during the upstream phase of the decision-making process (Cotton and Devine-Wright 2013). Public consultation can occur later, and community meetings can have the goals of limiting engagement to final route selection and of selling the project.