We're Losing the Transmission Wars

Or, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, the Electricity Version

By Matthew L. Wald

Sometimes it seems that the political and economic system of the United States is simply not set up to take full advantage of the best available energy technology, nuclear reactors. But this is only a partial view of our problems; the mismatch between technology and governance is not, alas, confined to nuclear. As has become quietly but painfully obvious in the last few years, it is also true of transmission, specifically high-voltage direct current lines that could extend for hundreds of miles and make the grid cleaner, more stable, and more economical.

The failure to decarbonize promptly isn’t a technical issue, or a problem because of difficulty raising capital or making commercial arrangements. It’s an artifact of the regulatory system.

What gets built in the power system isn’t a function of what’s needed; it’s a function of what the regulatory system wants, or at least, what it will tolerate. That is what eventually determines the outlines of the energy system, including how clean, reliable, and expensive it will be.

Fifteen years ago, a Texas company set out to use modern technology to solve an obvious problem: the United States has a wind belt at its center, an area where the wind blows strongly enough to make electricity for many hours of the year. But the wind belt is sparsely populated, and demand for energy is to the west and the east. The company, Clean Line Energy Partners, planned to build four long-distance electric transmission, high voltage direct current (DC) electricity superhighways, each of which could securely deliver thousands of megawatts of power with low line losses.

And the last one of those sketched out lines may have just died, falling victim to a Republican U.S. Senator from Missouri who probably realized that there were votes to be had by joining the opposition and that the economic benefits of a transmission line crossing his state would go to other states.

The ability of a state to veto a transmission line is what gives us the fragmented grid we have today, a grid that becomes increasingly ill-suited to the job of moving electricity as needed, especially as we try to shift to zero carbon wind and solar.

This problem is clear to solar and wind developers but not so much to activists and advocates of renewables. Without a grid that can transport energy from the most efficient renewables—wind in the midwest, solar in the southwest—a wind and solar-focused decarbonization plan means higher prices and continued use of fossil fuel generation.

Three Down, One Going Down

Productivity in a wind machine is measured by capacity factor, which is a comparison of the amount of energy actually produced in a year with what would have resulted from 100 percent performance, 24/7/365. The average capacity factor for onshore wind in the United States is about 35 percent. Kansas, where the power line would have started, is closer to 47 percent. So the same turbine built in Kansas would make about one-third more megawatt-hours in a year than the U.S. average.

That is one of the two big reasons that wind needs transmission, because the wind farms must be located where the wind is, often in remote places. The other is that the system benefits when wind farms are connected from many diverse locations. Geographic diversity reduces the variability in wind, and variability is wind’s great weakness.

The last of Clean Line’s transmission quartet was the Grain Belt Express, which was supposed to run from Dodge City, in southwest Kansas, on a route that ran north of Kansas City, Missouri, across Illinois south of Springfield, and to the border with Indiana, nearly 800 miles. The backers said it would cost $11 billion but would save $52 billion in energy costs over 15 years, and would provide 5,500 jobs directly, with more connected to the new generation that would be built to connect to the line, and in places that could use the electricity.

Clean Line, a company based in Houston, eventually bowed out of the business and sold its assets to others. One of those, the Grain Belt Express, seemed poised to succeed.Last November, Biden’s Energy Department conditionally approved a $4.9 billion loan guarantee for the first phase of the project. On July 23, the conditional loan guarantee was withdrawn. According to news reports, in a meeting with Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, President Trump—who doesn’t like wind, because he doesn’t like wind—picked up the phone to call Chris Wright, the Energy Secretary, and told him to cancel the loan. And the Missouri Attorney General says he is investigating whether the sponsors “relied on speculative and possibly fraudulent assumptions.”

The line could still be built, but it’s not looking good.

Transmission lines are usually fairly short, and Clean Line defied conventional thinking by proposing lines that crossed states and regions. The U.S. grid has hundreds of different owners, and is divided into multiple planning regions. A company like Clean Line that wants to build across state lines must be recognized as a utility in each state, and the public service commission in each state must recognize the project as being in the public interest. Only then can the company line up a right-of-way.

In pursuit of permission, Clean Line held dozens of community meetings on the route. But, there is a saying in the business: The public interest is different from the interested public.

The original proposal included a Plains & Eastern line, which would have carried 4,000 megawatts of power 720 miles from the Oklahoma panhandle to the Southeastern states; and a Centennial West line that would have carried 3,500 megawatts from New Mexico to California. The Rock Island Clean Line would have run 500 miles from the upper Midwest towards Chicago.

The problem for Clean Line and other developers is that they must win approval in each state, some of which may not benefit. And wherever they go, they are outsiders. There is no sense of national priorities in transmission.

“Silly Clean Line,” taunted one West Virginia opposition website. “It's not about whether the transmission line is transporting ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ energy.”

"Wind energy must be transported to east coast states so that wind developers in Kansas, Oklahoma and Iowa can get rich? It’s not about farmers or landowners cashing in, it's all about private, for-profit corporations and their investors making a whole bunch of money off the backs of what they arrogantly consider to be uneducated rube farmers and environmentally conscious but sadly oblivious east coast consumers who are easily fooled by the green-washing Midwest ‘wind’ scheme.”

After years of work, the Grain Belt project was the last glimmer of hope for a turn to a technology that would establish superhighways for long-distance electricity transmission.

Sub-Optimal Renewables

Building transmission is always difficult because people don’t like the towers and wire. DC transmission towers are smaller, and the towers are lower, but there is a particular difficulty for direct current. A DC line is a little like an interstate highway, and an AC line is like a city street. To add energy to a DC line or take energy from it requires building a large and expensive converter station, to change from DC to AC. For an AC line, all you need is a transformer to adjust the voltage. Hence in intermediate spots along the route, a DC transmission line provides no more benefit for a neighboring town than an interstate highway that passes through with no interchange. Politically, that’s a good way to foster opposition.

But DC has technical advantages. In a DC line, the electrons actually travel down the line, and back again. It’s the transmission system that was favored by Thomas Edison, but builders eventually decided that Alternating Current (AC), championed by Nikola Tesla, was more practical. In AC lines the electrons travel a very short distance, and alternate directions 120 times a second, on the familiar 60 cycle frequency. Household wiring, importantly, is AC.

High voltage DC lines deliver power with smaller line losses. DC lines can be buried more easily than AC lines, and if they are hung from towers, the towers can be smaller, reducing the visual impact. They can be used to deliver power from one grid to another when the grids are not synchronized, which is a major consideration at the borders of the three major alternating current grids in the United States, the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and Texas.

Even within those grids, connections are not nearly strong enough. The system, especially in the East, grew out of individual city grids, gradually knit together, for reasons of reliability and economy. Interconnecting the systems of multiple utilities allowed them to share capacity, a far more economical arrangement than having each system build enough to meet its own peak demand, while a neighbor’s system had idle generators. But that is different from the grid that is needed for pulling energy half way across the continent.

The contrast with the system for transporting natural gas is stunning. Gas lines are regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and are planned with a continental-scale market in mind.

The current electricity system requires frequent computer-run auctions to assure that at any given moment, the least expensive combination of generators is running. That often means shipping more megawatts more miles.

That, combined with construction of renewable energy farms distant from load centers, should be eliciting more construction of transmission lines. The Department of Energy’s 2024 National Transmission Planning Study calls for increasing transmission capacity by 2050 by a factor of 2.1 to 2.6, with a focus on “interregional,” long transmission lines. This implies construction of about 5,000 miles per year. Building more transmission could cut carbon dioxide emissions by 43 to 48 percent, the study found. But less than 900 miles of high-voltage transmission lines were finished in 2024.

For every dollar invested in transmission, $1.60 to $1.80 is saved, because plants that are cheap to run can operate more hours of the year, and expensive plants run less. The plants with high operating costs tend to be fossil-fired, which is why emissions also decline with more transmission.

There could be a silver lining of sorts; with less transmission, grid reliability will require more nuclear energy. It could mean that the only carbon-free way to serve the electric needs of big load centers is to build reactors near them, because continental-scale grid projects, or even inter-regional ones, are beyond our grasp. Being anti-transmission makes you, in effect, pro-nuclear. But most people don’t connect those dots.

The mismatch between public interest and interested public in the transmission world is the flip side of the nuclear case, where neighbors want new nuclear facilities of all kinds but politicians further away are skeptical. It mirrors the nuclear problem because transmission improvements are long-term solutions, and the market system is geared to quick fixes and short-term outcomes, not to putting large amounts of capital at risk for many years.

In both cases, the regulatory structure gets in the way of an energy system that is optimized for price, reliability, and cleanliness.

Building wind and sun in the best possible locations is going to become even more important as federal subsidies disappear. But instead of optimally sited renewables made possible by a rational grid, we’re more likely to get sub-optimal wind and solar combined with continued fossil-fuel generation. It means that the last few years of engineering advances in those fields are not realized in actual construction. It means that electricity costs more than it should, because choosing the combination of generation resources with the lowest operating cost is often impossible because of electricity traffic jams. It also means that progress on emissions reduction will be slower, even if we build more and more renewables.