The biggest impediment to the US achieving a cleaner power grid isn’t climate deniers or fossil-fuel lobbies; it’s a lack of transmission lines. The country badly needs more conduits to cart wind and solar energy and hydropower to cities.
For more than a decade, multibillion-dollar power-line projects have struggled to advance, slowed or halted by bureaucracy, NIMBYism or general industry stasis. Now suddenly, several are progressing — and with them the prospect of newly unleashed clean energy as well as more resilient grids in the face of ever-dangerous storms and extreme heatwaves.
*Pattern Energy’s SunZia project is designed to transport more than three gigawatts of clean power — equivalent to about three nuclear reactors — from New Mexico to Arizona, where it can then flow to the West Coast. *
The $6 billion Champlain Hudson Power Express, a Blackstone Group-backed project to bring Canadian hydropower to New York City