Minnesota takes rare step to allow power lines…


Here are two key facts about transmission lines: The U.S. needs a lot more of them to transition away from fossil fuels; they’re also incredibly difficult to build.

A big part of the challenge is negotiating permits for the power lines — which typically cross hundreds of miles of land — from the numerous jurisdictions and hundreds of private landowners along the planned route. This is a very slow process — too slow at its current pace for the U.S. to build enough power lines to meet its climate goals.

For the past half decade, bipartisan groups have been pushing federal and state lawmakers and transportation agencies to clear the way for a potential shortcut: siting power lines alongside highways.

Last month, Minnesota lawmakers handed them an early victory on this high-voltage highway concept. As part of a bundle of climate laws and policies passed in this year’s legislative session, a provision in an omnibus transportation bill has ended a decade-long prohibition against siting utility infrastructure on the land along state and interstate highways owned and managed by the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

The law opens up all highway rights-of-way for transmission co-location,” said Randy Satterfield, executive director of the NextGen Highways initiative. The nonprofit group has led the advocacy work in the state, including producing a 2022 report demonstrating that power lines along highways are a safe and cost-effective option for the state, and building a coalition of clean energy and labor groups to support the change in the siting law.

Now, NextGen Highway supporters are getting ready for the next steps in their effort: expanding the policy to other states and getting utilities and grid operators in Minnesota to actually make use of the highway transmission routes currently on offer.

NextGen Highways 1.0 is removing the barriers,” said Matthew Prorok, senior policy manager at the nonprofit Great Plains Institute, a founding member of the coalition. NextGen Highways 2.0 is realizing the vision — and to do that you need to incentivize the parties to come together.”

The problem that NextGen Highways is trying to solve

The U.S. needs to double or triple the capacity of its high-voltage transmission grid to make room for the massive amounts of clean energy needed to achieve its climate goals, make the grid more resilient against extreme weather, and serve a growing and increasingly electric-powered economy.

But transmission lines can take more than a decade to site, permit, finance, and build, and many falter in the face of opposition from the hundreds of public and private landowners who can challenge projects crossing their property lines.

Highway rights-of-way provide a neat solution to this challenge, Satterfield said.

State transportation departments, which own and manage both state and interstate highways, are a single entity to negotiate with. And while state agencies manage interstate highways under regulations set by the Federal Highway Administration, the Biden administration issued guidance in 2021 that encourages states to open those rights-of-way for pressing public needs relating to climate change, equitable communications access, and energy reliability.”

It’s hard to say how much transmission could be built if every state allowed it on highway rights-of-way. But this map from NGI Consulting, a consultancy formed in 2020 that’s since been folded into NextGen Highways, indicates how the country’s interstate highways could serve as pathways for the roughly sketched-in interregional high-voltage direct current (HVDC) interconnections that the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory has found could enable a significant expansion of U.S. renewable energy capacity.

Image credit: NGI Consulting

But states have been slow to shift from long-standing policies that aim to keep highway rights-of-way clear of other infrastructure that could compromise safety, burden transportation departments with unforeseen costs, or restrict the option of expanding highways in the future. Many states bar utility infrastructure from highway rights-of-way. Those that don’t have been slow to take on the coordination between transportation agencies and utility regulators to make transmission co-location possible.

The key exception to date has been Minnesota’s eastern neighbor, Wisconsin, which passed a law in 2003 that’s enabled utilities to build hundreds of miles of high-voltage overhead power lines and towers along highways. While it’s hard to say whether those lines would have cost more or taken longer without that law, Satterfield noted that an alternative route for the biggest such project undertaken, the Badger–Coulee transmission line built in the Interstates 9094 corridor, would have crossed the property of more than 300 private landowners, setting up the potential for permitting disputes and lawsuits.

Just because transmission lines can be built along highways doesn’t mean that utilities and regional grid planners will pursue the option, of course. That’s where the next stage of work comes in, Satterfield said.

Getting the highways into the grid plans 

In Minnesota, the chief forum for transmission expansions runs through the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the grid operator for all or part of 15 U.S. states and Canada’s Manitoba province. MISO is now in the midst of a long-range transmission plan (LRTP) process that represents the single largest regional grid expansion in the country.



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