In two years, the American Southwest is expected to cut the ribbon on one of the biggest and most environmentally audacious projects in recent history. Consisting of a gigantic wind farm in New Mexico and a transmission line more than 500 miles long running to Arizona, the SunZia project will generate more power than the Hoover Dam and immediately become the Western Hemisphere’s biggest renewable energy project — powerful enough to, at peak, generate 1 percent of America’s electricity needs.
It is a project to celebrate — the kind of ambitious energy endeavor that we should be doing more of. But it’s also a project to fret over, because SunZia has taken far too long to build. Conceived in 2006, the project is now old enough to vote; when it is finally powered on in 2026, it will be nearly old enough to buy a Modelo. SunZia exemplifies how hard it is to build big new power lines in America — how long it takes, how expensive it can be, how bad that is for the planet and how urgently Congress needs to do something about it.
No matter how you look at it, America needs more power lines. If you care about slowing climate change, then building more transmission infrastructure is essential to connecting new wind and solar energy to the power grid. Wind, in particular, is lagging in part because many of the best areas to build — windy places near a grid hookup — already have turbines on them. If you care about developing artificial intelligence, then building more power lines gives you more abundant electricity and a power grid stable enough to support new data centers. And if you’re just a regular person paying your power bill, then more transmission capacity should keep your electricity costs down by allowing places with cheap and plentiful power to sell it to regions where it is more expensive while helping to stave off blackouts. California’s grid avoided blackouts during a 2022 heat wave in part because it is well connected to neighboring grids.
Building more power lines, in other words, is an urgent national need. But over the past decade, construction of long-distance lines has slowed down. The problem is that it’s much harder to get permits for transmission projects than for other types of major infrastructure: Power line developers must go hat in hand to cities, counties, states, the local utility board and many federal agencies to get permission to break ground on projects. After that, they can expect to have to endure seemingly endless rounds of environmental review and permitting litigation. By contrast, developers of a natural gas pipeline essentially need to go to only one federal agency for most of their permits.
One recent lawsuit against SunZia is instructive. In June a federal court rejected one of the last major lawsuits against the project, brought by two Native American tribes, an archaeology group and an environmental group. That lawsuit, in essence, accused the government of failing to fully study the route where SunZia’s transmission line would be built, arguing that even though the government had been studying the project off and on since 2009, it had not done it in the right way. If the government had studied the land correctly, the lawsuit claimed, then it most likely would have changed part of the line’s route.
The judge ultimately dismissed the suit because the time had long passed when the government could alter the route. (The project still faces other challenges in court, and its opponents say they will probably appeal the June ruling.)
Native American tribes certainly deserve a special say in how and where we build infrastructure in the West. But the lawsuit against SunZia reveals how much the current system fails everyone.
At this point, opponents of SunZia have spent years and millions of dollars bickering over environmental analysis. That’s because the lawsuit was waged under federal permitting law — and permitting provides very few affirmative protections for the environment. Unlike the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, which empower the government to clean up the air or protect certain animals, America’s permitting laws insist that the government only study the impact of its actions. While that can sometimes result in better outcomes, it means that all arguments have to proceed in a roundabout fashion; when an outside group opposes a project, it has to argue that the project’s environmental impact has been insufficiently examined and analyzed.
In other words, if you want to block a project, you don’t try to kill it on the merits; you just force the government to conduct more and more environmental studies until politicians or developers run out of patience or money. Behind countless major infrastructure projects is an expensive war of attrition.
You could call it studyitis: It now takes too many studies for the government to do anything. This problem — although common across the government — particularly ails the effort to build more long-distance transmission capacity. And you can see it even in programs that are supposed to speed up construction of lines.
Two years ago, Congress included a provision in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that renewed the government’s power to declare special zones where it would be easier to build large-scale transmission lines. The zones are a great idea, and the government recently unveiled the first 10 proposed areas for the designation; they would connect New York to its neighboring power grids in the Mid-Atlantic and New England, link the Pacific Northwest to Nevada and conjoin the upper Midwest’s thicket of power grids.
But in order to use these corridors, the government will have to do a lot of studies. Maria Robinson, the Energy Department official in charge of the program, recently laid them out for me. First, she said, the government will have to study the environmental impact of saying that these 10 places should be special corridors where it’s easier to build power lines.
Then, developers will have to apply to the Energy Department to receive public funding to build a line, at which point the government would commission another study. (That’s Study No. 2.) Finally, if the developer needs to apply to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to receive expedited approval for its project, then the commission, too, will need to do a study (That’s Study No. 3.), although it might be able to borrow some of the Energy Department’s work.
In other words, the law requires the Energy Department and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to conduct an expensive study simultaneously to see if the same power line in one of those zones qualifies for the same underlying program. Partly for that reason, Ms. Robinson told me, she doesn’t expect any of the transmission projects built in the special corridors to come online until around the end of the decade. And this is a policy, mind you, that is supposed to speed up power line construction.
Congress should act to solve this problem. Senator John Hickenlooper, a Democrat from Colorado, and Representative Scott Peters, a Democrat from California, have already introduced a bill to streamline the number of studies required for this transmission program. But Congress also needs to solve the whole slew of problems that arise from our permitting mess, and quickly. We need a better permitting system, one that makes smarter and faster decisions and gets power lines or zero-carbon power plants up and running in just a few years, not decades.
Environmentalists sometimes insist that climate change is one of the most urgent problems of our time and that we have only a handful of years left to solve it. No dollar can be wasted, no second spared, in combating the existential danger. To meet our emissions goals, we may need to triple the size of our power grid in the next 26 years, according to Princeton’s Net-Zero America study.
But when it comes time to build more infrastructure, faster, activists often balk, worried that reforming our permitting system is a ruse to tear up bedrock environmental laws. It’s true that permitting reform will require compromise with Republicans, which means — inevitably — compromise with the fossil-fuel companies in the G.O.P. coalition.
But to eliminate carbon pollution from the power grid, we need to build more, soon — new solar farms, wind turbines, batteries and transmission lines, new geothermal and new nuclear power plants. Fossil fuels have largely already received their permitting reform; it is easy to build them quickly. If we fail to clear the way for clean energy, then I fear America will respond to its next decade of economic growth by doubling down on oil and gas.