Scrolling through my newsfeed this morning, I came across this video report by the Financial Times. It explores the need for transmission development in the U.S. and the reasons behind its stagnation, with a special emphasis on the Cardinal-Hickory Creek high-voltage project. The video might not contain much new information for the members of Energy Central, but I think it’s worth a watch just to see how this conversation in the mainstream media is evolving, finally.
The video does an especially good job shining a light on the democratic mechanisms that, while well-intentioned, have hamstrung transmission development to the detriment of society. They interview Dan Danielson, a campaigner for Save Our Unique Lands (Soul) of Wisconsin, an environmental group pushing to stop the Cardinal-Hickory Creek project that would promote renewable energy in the region traditionally reliant on coal. Mr. Danielson seems like a really nice guy who cares about birds. He is, of course, putting all species on earth at risk of climate-change induced extinction. But he probably doesn’t know that.
An Atlantic article published last year did a very good job of explaining the community input problem that people like Dan Danielson get caught up in:
“The community-input process is disastrous for two broad reasons. First, community input is not representative of the local population. Second, the perception of who counts as part of an affected local community tends to include everyone who feels the negative costs of development but only a fragment of the beneficiaries.
Not everybody is a complainer, but pretty much everyone who shows up to community meetings is. Katherine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer, Boston University political scientists and co-authors of Neighborhood Defenders, examined zoning and planning meetings across Massachusetts. They found that a measly 14.6 percent of people who showed up to these events were in favor of the relevant projects. Meeting participants were also 25 percentage points more likely to be homeowners and were significantly older, maler, and whiter than their communities.”
Examples of our community input mechanism gone awry are everywhere: Cardinal-Hickory Creek, The Champlain Hudson Power Express, The New England Clean Energy Connect, all come to mind, but there are many more. The net result as of 2021, according to the Atlantic: “Since 2009, China has built more than 18,000 miles of ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines. The U.S. has built zero.”
These are the constant battles that transition projects are almost guaranteed to endure in the USA. Even when the opposition doesn’t succeed in derailing the project altogether, they hold them up. Until our broken system of community input is reformed, the U.S. is destined to a hamstrung transmission system, and consequently sub-par renewable adoption as well. We know what the root problem is, now it’s time to take action.
But that leads us to our next problem: America’s broken government. As different interviewees in Financial Times video explain, partisanship is keeping American legislators from making meaningful reforms on permitting processes and the likes. Basically, left-wing Democrats are terrified of doing anything that could facilitate new fossil fuel infrastructure and Republicans are loath to pass legislation that would make Biden’s infrastructure program more of a success. Welcome to America, folks.