Stringing the land with ugly wires has always sparked pushback. This time the fight includes hefty corporate rivals that stand to lose a share of the market. And the stakes are rising as electricity emerges as the quickest way to strip carbon from the energy system in an effort to stem climate change.Article content
Rich Glick, the new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, wants his agency to reassess policy to trigger more transmission investment. “We have to substantially build out the grid more than we’ve been doing,” he said. The buildout would require spending US$3 billion to US$7 billion a year to 2030, and another $7 billion to $25 billion a year in the following 20 years — on top of US$15 billion a year in past transmission investment, according to a Brattle Group study for Wires, a trade group.
The project has splintered environmentalists. It was endorsed by the Conservation Law Foundation and Union of Concerned Scientists, who cited the clean energy that would flow into New England. “They chose a very xenophobic message that I find incredibly troubling,” said Thorn Dickinson, chief executive of the Avangrid company building the Maine project.
As we say in Alberta Let em freeze !