America needs transmission

OPINION:

Roads and bridges are likely among the first things you think of when someone mentions infrastructure. Yet another very important piece of infrastructure runs along highways and cuts through fields, and quite literally powers our country.

Transmission, like every piece of linear infrastructure, facilitates interstate commerce by getting electricity from the point of generation, like a coal-fired power plant or a wind turbine, to consumers. It is an essential component of any electrical grid.

We use more electricity now than ever before, and forecasts indicate the need for generation and transmission capacity is dramatically increasing. Data centers, for one, contribute to the increased demand, especially with the increase of artificial intelligence and cloud storage. This is, of course, without even factoring in liberals’ industrial and electric vehicles-for-all electrification fantasies.

Nobody denies demand is growing, but that might be where the consensus ends. And as with any infrastructure project, need is not the only question. We must also determine which projects get built and who pays for the billion-dollar projects, also known as cost allocation. Admittedly, this gets challenging with integrated utilities and electric cooperatives serving customers in multiple states. Tradition and law dictate that the most equitable solution is one in which the user pays. When a Minnesota utility built a coal plant in North Dakota, Minnesotans paid for the plant and the transmission line to bring the power to them. That is just and reasonable. Now, Minnesota has passed a renewables-only mandate and expects consumers in every state in its region to help supply and pay for it.

To help facilitate costly public policies like Minnesota’s, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently finalized a new regulation dictating how future transmission efforts are planned and funded. It expanded and mandated the scope of “benefits” to consider when approving new projects. This stacked the deck in favor of renewables by requiring other factors, such as climate considerations, to be included instead of evaluating projects on reliability and economics.

As a result of this new rule, FERC has co-opted citizens into paying for green states’ renewable energy transmission projects they do not need and will not directly benefit from. That is neither just nor reasonable.

While the law maintains states are well within their rights to make decisions about energy generation, they have no right to force the citizens of other states to pay for their policy choices. If Minnesota, New York, and California want renewables only, the citizens of those states should pay for it, not the citizens of North Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Once the question of which projects and who pays has been answered, permitting begins. Like any infrastructure project, too many permits are required, and they can take a decade, or more, with a plethora of hoops to jump through.

It’s well known that federal bureaucracy is an unnecessarily high hurdle and needs to be pared back. Renewable advocates have proposed transmission-specific reforms, but Congress should be focused on making the process easier for all linear infrastructure.

When Congress passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) last June, we authorized National Environmental Policy Act streamlining, but implementation has been a vast departure from congressional intent. New regulations from the White House make the bureaucratic hurdle even higher, while adding carveouts and exemptions to expedite the process for industries they prefer, namely renewable generation and transmission lines. This lopsided approach tilts the scales for favored projects while slapping red tape on everyone else.

Here is what we know: transmission is necessary but expensive, someone will have to pay for it, and the permitting process is broken. Somehow liberals in Washington looked at this set of facts and concluded the solution was to tip the scales in favor of unreliable, costly renewables, while making ratepayers in states who do not want or need them foot the bill. While transmission policy is complicated, it is not rocket science to know a growing economy needs a 24/7 grid, not one that hiccups with shifting winds and a setting sun. Political bias and unaccountable bureaucrats should not build the grid. The end result will inevitably be a classic Washington blunder: costly, centralized, and full of special interests.

Transmission and generation go hand in hand and are essential to a stable grid and dynamic American economy. This is a job for engineers and accountable state regulators. We should empower them to build a grid that actually works and does not cost a fortune.

• Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., is the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure. He also serves on the Senate Armed Services, Veterans’ Affairs, and Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committees. His prior service includes time on the North Dakota Public Service Commission and in the U.S. House of Representatives.