Three decades ago, Idaho Power proposed a 575-mile transmission line connecting the power grids in southern Nevada and Idaho. The benefits were straightforward: The desert Southwest, where electricity demand peaked in the summer as Phoenix and Las Vegas cranked the air conditioning, could swap power with the Pacific Northwest, where heating demand spiked during winter cold snaps. The resulting bridge would cut costs by mitigating some of the need for new power plants, and simultaneously improve grid reliability in both regions.
The Southwest Intertie Project, or SWIP, cleared several major hurdles early on, including getting federal right-of-way and finishing its environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. But that’s where momentum stalled. Decades of delay followed, as county-level land disputes held up permits, federal regulators clashed over rate structures, and developers struggled to line up customers and distribute the costs across multiple utilities.
The first segment finally entered service in 2014. The last leg, which will bring the line into Idaho, only broke ground this month, twelve years later. But even that wasn’t certain — as recently as last fall, one county was debating whether to revoke an already-granted special use permit after local landowners appealed its approval. Assuming all goes according to plan from here on out, SWIP’s northern leg will come online in 2028.
The delays plaguing SWIP aren’t unique. Building interregional transmission lines in every part of the U.S. is slow. But things are worse in the West. Projects can take two or three times as long as they do in other parts of the country, due in part to the region’s vast tracts of federal land that trigger permitting reviews by an alphabet soup of government agencies, as well as the fact the region has no central grid planner. Only California has an ISO.
Officials in the West know they need to speed things up, especially now that electricity demand is soaring thanks to data centers, reshored manufacturing, and population booms in certain cities. Meeting the moment will require Western states to swap energy across longer distances, from the variable solar and wind projects in rural parts of the Southwest, to the enhanced geothermal power emerging in the desolate deserts of Nevada and Utah.
The region isn’t waiting for federal permitting reform out of Congress, the odds of which get slimmer by the day as lawmakers stare down the midterms in November. Instead, Western governors, utilities, independent power producers, and transmission developers are working on their own region-wide initiatives to identify key projects and streamline state permitting processes that are often a big bottleneck.
But will these voluntary efforts be enough to overcome the hurdles of the past?
“The West has a culture of rugged individualism, skepticism, and distrust,” Brian Turner, who leads Advanced Energy United’s regulatory affairs in the West, told Latitude Media. “We have decades of studies indicating the benefits of interregional transmission — you could fill an entire bookshelf — and many attempts to get us to work together.”
That said, the West now has processes in place to deal with the three biggest obstacles to building long-haul transmission: planning, permitting, and paying for it, Turner added. “That’s why things are different now, and where the opportunity lies. The urgency has never been higher.”
The ‘three Ps’ of transmission
Turner isn’t alone in his optimism that things might be different this time around. Over the last two years, several bipartisan initiatives aim to lay a foundation for greater collaboration on long-haul transmission lines.
Earlier this year, the Western Transmission Expansion Coalition — a group of utilities, transmission developers, independent power producers, and Tribes — released the results of the first industry-led, region-wide transmission needs study. The report identified more than 12,600 miles of new transmission lines or major upgrades needed across 105 projects, in order to handle a forecasted 30% surge in power demand in the next decade. That level of growth is three times higher than the previous decade. About 9,400 miles of those lines are already planned, but only 20% are nearing construction.
The study filled a critical planning gap in the region, explained Sarah Edmonds, CEO of the Western Power Pool, which convened WestTec. A single entity doesn’t have the authority to analyze the West as a whole, select a project, direct it to be built, and then socialize the costs. The only ISO in the region is CAISO, in California. In the rest of the West, more than 30 different balancing authorities act as the air traffic controllers of the electric grid for their own geographic footprints.
And while the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regulates the wholesale side of the market, FERC can’t force planning for the entire Western footprint, Edmonds explained. FERC orders do apply to subregional transmission planning, but Western states have generally been distrustful of that process. Notably, the West’s two FERC-jurisdictional planning regions have never produced a new transmission project for regional cost allocation.
One promising change during the last two years, Turner said, is that states developed their own cost allocation frameworks, which are awaiting FERC approval. They consider benefits like greater resiliency during extreme weather, reducing congestion and capacity costs, avoiding building new power generation, and meeting clean energy goals. They would only be triggered for projects identified through the FERC sub-regional planning process, which is separate from the industry-led proposals made by WestTec. But Turner noted that the cost allocation frameworks could be used as a starting point for any regional transmission project.
Given the state-level resistance to federal cost allocation, the norm is for merchant developers to take on all of a transmission project’s financial risk by raising capital on the private market. Then they negotiate bilateral deals with utilities and other power producers along the line’s route to buy capacity. Several developers told Latitude Media that cost allocation isn’t nearly as difficult as permitting anyway.
“The demand for energy is so significant right now that if you’ve got power to sell, people want to buy it,” said Varner Seaman, director of government affairs at Pattern Energy, which developed the 550-mile SunZia line from New Mexico to Arizona. “But if you don’t have a permit, you don’t have power to sell.”
A permitting moonshot
Major projects like SunZia need approvals from state agencies, water and stormwater authorities, environmental regulators, species protection officials, cultural resource experts, tribal governments, and counties. That project, which took two decades to complete and required as many as a thousand individual permits, has become the quintessential example of how complex it is to build transmission in the West.
These projects take years in part because the timelines of all those various permitting processes often don’t line up, explained Mitch Colburn, vice president of planning, engineering, and construction at Idaho Power.
The West has a culture of rugged individualism, skepticism, and distrust….We have decades of studies indicating the benefits of interregional transmission — you could fill an entire bookshelf — and many attempts to get us to work together.
That’s the challenge that the Western Governors’ association is planning to take on in an initiative launched in June called the “Permitting Alignment and Coordination Task Force,” or PACT. Twelve bipartisan governors, led by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, endorsed it. The task force is focused on coordinating their respective permitting regimes so developers can examine entire, multi-state corridors at once, said Emy Lesofski, director of the Utah Office of Energy Development and energy advisor to Cox.
That would be a significant improvement over the current process, in which a developer typically advances a project state by state along the route, only discovering conflicts as it seeks local approval for part of the line.
How exactly PACT will approach this remains fuzzy, especially considering the stark political differences within the coalition when it comes to renewables development, among other issues. As Lesofski put it, any changes PACT makes must “respect what individual states want for themselves.”
The coalition has its first meeting later this month, but doesn’t yet have a clear list of action items. At least initially, whether PACT is successful won’t necessarily be measured by how many transmission lines get built, Lesofski said. Instead, the goal is to “improve communication” and get “more eyes on it and a process to keep projects moving forward.”
Seaman, at Pattern Energy, said the most useful outcome of PACT would be for states to share best practices. New Mexico, for example, has managed to build major transmission in recent years, thanks in part to its use of a quasi-public entity known as a state transmission authority. It serves as liaison between the state government and the private sector to get projects built faster. Colburn, for his part, wants to see “consistency between federal and state requirements and timelines.”
Similar permitting initiatives have formed before. Turner noted that the Western Governors Association launched a task force while he represented both California Govs. Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger between 2008 and 2012. It wasn’t as effective as the new effort could be, Turner said, because there weren’t complementary efforts on planning and cost allocation.
The BPA twist
Several Western energy officials said it’s significant that the Bonneville Power Administration endorsed the WestTEC study. BPA — created by Congress nearly a century ago under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to market hydropower from federal dams and bring electricity to rural residents — controls 75% of the transmission infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest.
Since the 1990s, BPA has added less than 500 miles of new lines within its own service territory, and only collaborated on one interregional project. BPA was an original sponsor of Boardman to Hemingway, before withdrawing from direct ownership in 2022 and transferring its share to PacifiCorp and Idaho Power.
That wasn’t a major concern when electricity demand was flat. Now, energy planners for Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington estimate the region will need to add about 16 gigawatts of mostly clean energy within six years to maintain grid reliability. BPA officials told Latitude Media that there is about 175 GW in its generation interconnection queue, a staggering amount considering the average is about 12 GW. Much of that is likely speculative, officials said, so BPA wants to prioritize projects with the most “commercial readiness.”
BPA already has some projects underway, although so far they are mainly upgrades to existing infrastructure to add capacity. The BPA is planning a new 53-mile line within Oregon and a 265-mile line from the Columbia River to the Oregon-Nevada border. The latter isn’t expected to be energized by 2035, and its completion is contingent on clearing the federal NEPA process.
WestTEC identified several more potential new lines that would either sit within BPA’s territory or connect it to other Western grids. That includes one from Montana to Washington, called New Townsend Ashe, that would move wind generation west into BPA’s regional grid. Another from Oregon deeper into Nevada, called Walker River, would complete an interregional bridge.
Western energy officials said they’re encouraged that Travis Kavulla, who previously led energy policy at Base Power and NRG Energy and has called for expanding the grid, was appointed BPA’s new administrator and CEO in June.
“As the transmission team knows, every time I meet with them, I’m asking, ‘How can we speed things up?’” Kavulla said during an Aug. 19 workshop on BPA’s grid transformation efforts. He added that the main question that BPA is getting is, “Can we get the show on the road here, in terms of converting planning into capital assets that are commissioned and in the ground?”
Is this time really different?
BPA officials and some transmission developers told Latitude Media that the WestTec study has spurred preliminary conversations about getting new projects off the ground. Coburn, of Idaho Power, said WestTec didn’t identify many projects that weren’t already on its radar — though a forthcoming 20-year study is expected to do so.
But WestTec, PACT, and new cost allocation formulas can only go so far. None of those initiatives mandate that a project get built, nor do they influence the federal permitting process — which is often unpredictable, redundant, and prone to litigation.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sent mixed signals on long-haul transmission. The Energy Department last year cancelled a previously approved, $5-billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express in the Midwest, a line originally designed to carry electricity from renewables projects in Kansas to more densely populated parts of the region. But DOE maintained a $700 million grant for the North Plains Connector, a 420-mile link between Montana and North Dakota that won’t be completed until 2032 at the earliest. It would carry a mix of power, including renewables, to urban centers.
An early test of whether the West’s latest transmission initiatives are working will be the 330-mile transmission line Pattern Energy is developing between Utah and Nevada. The SilverRock project, which was identified in WestTec, would move power between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas and unlock access to solar and enhanced geothermal power in central Utah, where Fervo’s Cape Station project is located. Other geothermal developers are bidding for land in the area at record-breaking rates.
Seaman is hopeful that SilverRock can showcase the benefits of greater coordination in the West and with the federal government. The project is part of FAST-41, a federal permitting effort dating back to 2015 aimed at expediting final decisions. The Bureau of Land Management formally opened the NEPA process for the project last week, meaning public comments will soon start to roll in.
SilverRock also has support from the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada, and Pattern is in early conversations with the Cox administration about holding it up as one of the “highlighted projects” under PACT. That political support, he added, could help overcome the inevitable opposition to come.
