'More environmental reviews, more governments with veto power, more restrictions on the use of eminent domain': laws and regulations originally aimed at oil and gas pipelines risk ensnaring long-distance power lines.
Building additional long-distance power lines — hulking ski lift-like structures visible from miles away — is key to America’s transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar power, a number of experts believe. Since solar farms tend to be in sunny southwestern states like California or Texas, while most wind farms are in windy states such as Iowa or Illinois, it's important to be able to send that electricity to regions lacking in wind or sun.
But others suggested that the rulings doubled down on a doctrine of expanded federal environmental reviews in ways that could come back to haunt power lines and renewables. In the Dakota Access Pipeline case, for example, a D.C. district court judge said the pipeline must shut down until a sweeping environmental review he had ordered the government to undertake in March is completed.
“Power lines have actually provoked more political controversy than pipelines,” said Ryan Driskell Tate, an analyst at Global Energy Monitor, a non-governmental organization that catalogs fossil fuel infrastructure. “This kind of opposition that you’re seeing around pipelines can absolutely cause problems later down the road for power lines.... If you start having expanded environmental reviews, then that can carry over” into fewer of these projects getting approved.
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