It Takes Too Many Studies for the Government to Do the Right Thing
In two years, the American Southwest is expected to cut the ribbon on one of the biggest and most environmentally audacious projects in recent history. Consisting of a gigantic wind farm in New Mexico and a transmission line more than 500 miles long running to Arizona, the SunZia project will generate more power than the Hoover Dam and immediately become the Western Hemisphere’s biggest renewable energy project — powerful enough to, at peak, generate 1 percent of America’s electricity needs.
It is a project to celebrate — the kind of ambitious energy endeavor that we should be doing more of. But it’s also a project to fret over, because SunZia has taken far too long to build. First conceived in 2006, the project is now old enough to vote; when it is finally powered on in 2026, it will be nearly old enough to buy a Modelo. SunZia exemplifies how hard it is to build big new power lines in America — how long it takes, how expensive it can be, how bad that is for the planet and how urgently Congress needs to do something about it.
No matter how you look at it, America needs more power lines. If you care about slowing climate change, then building more transmission infrastructure is essential to connecting new wind and solar energy to the power grid. Wind in particular is lagging in part because many of the best areas to build — windy places near a grid hookup — already have turbines on them. If you care about developing artificial intelligence, then building more power lines gives you more abundant electricity and a power grid stable enough to support new data centers. And if you’re just a regular person paying your power bill, then more transmission capacity should keep your electricity costs down by allowing places with cheap and plentiful power to sell it to regions where it is more expensive while helping to stave off blackouts. California’s grid avoided blackouts during a 2022 heat wave in part because it is well connected to neighboring grids.
Building more power lines, in other words, is an urgent national need. But over the past decade, construction of new long-distance lines has slowed down. The problem is that it’s much harder to get permits for transmission projects than for other types of major infrastructure: Power line developers must go hat in hand to cities, counties, states, the local utility board and many federal agencies to get permission to break ground on a new project. After that, they can expect to have to endure seemingly endless rounds of environmental review and permitting litigation. By contrast, developers of a natural gas pipeline, essentially need to go to only one federal agency for most of their permits.
One recent lawsuit against SunZia is instructive. In June, a federal court rejected one of the last major lawsuits against the project, brought by two Native American tribes, an archaeology group and an environmental group. That lawsuit, in essence, accused the government of failing to fully study the route where SunZia’s transmission line would be built, arguing that even though the government had been studying the project off and on since 2009, it had not done it in the right way. If the government had studied the land correctly, the lawsuit claimed, then it most likely would have changed part of the line’s route.
The judge ultimately dismissed the suit because the time had long passed when the government could alter the route. (The project still faces other challenges in court, and its opponents say they will probably appeal the June ruling.)
