After nearly two decades in development, SunZia, the $11 billion, 3.6 gigawatt wind project built by Pattern Energy came online in New Mexico last week. It’s the country’s largest wind energy project, and is accompanied by a 550-mile HVDC transmission line designed to carry up to 3 GW of clean energy to southern Arizona and California. And it was built thanks in part to New Mexico’s unique model for getting transmission projects over the finish line: the state transmission authority.
SunZia’s completion is certainly a victory for the grid. But it has also become an emblem of just how hard it is to build large infrastructure projects. After being proposed in 2006, the project ran into repeated permitting delays, legal challenges, and routing obstacles (thanks in part to concerns about missile testing at nearby White Sands). And the project comes online at a time when the administration’s war on wind is still ongoing, and having ripple effects beyond the wind industry: to solar developers, the burgeoning advanced geothermal sector, and bipartisan permitting reform efforts.
New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich, a vocal advocate for permitting reform in the Senate, has been involved with SunZia since its permitting process first began in 2009. And the process of getting the project over the finish line, Heinrich said, comes with lessons for any large infrastructure project, including AI data centers.
Chief among them is “concentrating public engagement toward the beginning of the process, not five or six years in,” he told Latitude Media; that includes clearly demonstrating the project’s potential benefits for the nearby community. “I worry that the data center developers are not doing that well,” Heinrich added. “There’s a healthy dose of arrogance in some of these budget proposals rather than starting from a position of humility and really trying to partner with local communities.”
Despite the drawn-out timeline, Pattern Energy was successful in “bringing meaningful benefits to people along the route,” Heinrich said. He pointed to lease payments made to help keep ranches viable, funding for county and school budgets, and union construction jobs, for example: “That’s how you build a constituency of support for large infrastructure projects.” Notably, he added, it’s projects that have the strongest community support that are more prepared to “weather the changing winds of politics.”
Despite SunZia’s early struggles, “by the end we had such a wide array of people supporting this,” he added. “There were just a lot of economic benefits that, as those accrued, and as the boogeyman worst-case scenarios did not happen, more and more support built for the project.”
That didn’t happen organically, though: “It took political leadership…you need people who are willing to stick their neck out and facilitate the negotiations and the process along the way,” Heinrich said.
That said, the concerns stakeholders had about SunZia back in the early 2010s are distinct from those leading to opposition to data center projects around the country today, Heinrich said, pointing to emissions, water use, and of course, rising electricity prices. “If I was trying to sign a data center, I’d want to go into a community and say ‘Hey, we’re actually going to be able to lower your electricity bills.’”
But it’s not just data center developers that should be learning from SunZia; it’s other large infrastructure as well, including other energy projects: “Historically federal agencies have had a very serial process, and they need to be thinking about more of a parallel process, and we should encourage that through things like permitting reform,” Heinrich said.
There’s also room for improvement on the part of the executive branch, he added, given how complicated it can be to seek approvals at the federal level. “I also think it’s really important to have clear lines of leadership,” Heinrich said. “Every single administration should have somebody in the White House, who’s got a big dashboard of important infrastructure projects for the national interest, who is making sure that when there are conflicts, that they’re resolved in the most beneficial way.”
