Dive Brief:
- NextGen Highways launched its first statewide transmission siting coalition on Feb. 6, bringing together stakeholders in Minnesota including the Laborers’ International Union of North America – Minnesota and North Dakota, the Center for Rural Affairs, and the National Audubon Society.
- The coalition, convened by the Great Plains Institute, will identify barriers to colocating transmission infrastructure along existing public rights of way in Minnesota, develop strategies to overcome those barriers, and advocate for state law changes to enable prioritization of colocated transmission, per a NextGen Highways release.
- New Hampshire, Maine, and Wisconsin already have state laws prioritizing transmission colocation with existing utility and highway rights of way, known as longitudinal siting. But Minnesota and many other states prohibit the practice, which can speed up transmission permitting and build times, NextGen Highways CEO Randy Satterfield told Utility Dive in an interview.
Dive Insight:
The U.S. Department of Energy’s latest National Transmission Needs study, released in October, says the United States needs about 47,000 GW-miles of new high-voltage transmission capacity by 2035 under a moderate load-growth, high clean-energy scenario. That represents a 57% increase from present system capacity, according to DOE.
Yet the pace of transmission expansion remains slow, with just 386 miles of new high-voltage lines built in 2021, according to the American Clean Power Association. Individual projects can take 10 to 20 years to move from concept to interconnection; the 3-GW, 732-mile TransWest Express line is expected to finish construction in 2027, 22 years after initial planning began, per Wood Mackenzie.
Longitudinal siting can loosen this bottleneck and get high-capacity grid projects online faster, Satterfield said. New transmission lines located within existing highway or other linear infrastructure rights of way, including existing high-voltage transmission corridors, “bother fewer rural landowners” with standing to challenge the projects in court, he said.
“We’re already burdening them with renewable facilities” that require more land than thermal generation resources, Satterfield said.
The Minnesota coalition builds on a two-year study conducted by NextGen Highways and the Minnesota Department of Transportation, or MnDOT, to examine the feasibility of siting buried HVDC transmission lines alongside state-controlled highways. The study found that a future longitudinal siting process could draw on an existing collaborative process through which MnDOT, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, and the Minnesota Department of Commerce build new transmission lines just outside existing highway rights of way.
This year, NextGen Highways’ Minnesota coalition will lobby state lawmakers to authorize longitudinal siting, advocate for a state law to clarify siting priority for future transmission projects, and push back on MnDOT’s “cultural prohibition” on transmission within existing rights of way. Despite a recent Federal Highway Administration memo encouraging states to consider new transmission along highways, “some [state departments of transportation] say, ‘Well, that’s not how we do things here,’” Satterfield said.
Wisconsin’s 20-year-old transmission priority statute was instrumental in the selection of an Interstate highway corridor for much of the length of American Transmission Co. and Xcel Energy’s 180-mile Badger Coulee transmission line between Madison and La Crosse, Wisconsin. Though less direct than the “greenfield” option, the highway route required 300 to 400 fewer easements on private land, Satterfield said. The project took about eight years from concept to in-service, less than half the expected time for the TransWest Express line.
NextGen Highways’ Minnesota coalition hopes to achieve its goals by the end of 2024 and apply any lessons learned to future state transmission colocation coalitions, Satterfield said. But it’s not waiting for the Minnesota endgame to begin work elsewhere.
NextGen Highways sees the Midcontinent Independent System Operator’s pending Tranche 2 transmission approvals, expected later this year, as a catalyst for longitudinal siting advocacy in Iowa, Illinois and Michigan, which all need policy changes, Satterfield said. With tens of gigawatts of offshore wind capacity expected across the densely populated Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions by 2035, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts are ripe for similar coalition-based efforts, he added.
“We’re wading into four or five states [now] and want to be active in another 10 or so by the end of the year,” Satterfield said.
