Why it’s so hard to build new electrical transmission lines in the US

This story is part of CNBC’s “Transmission Troubles” series, an inside look at why the aging electrical grid in the U.S. is struggling to keep up, how it’s being improved, and why it’s so vital to fighting climate change. See also part 1, “Why America’s outdated energy grid is a climate problem.”

Building new transmission lines in the United States is like herding cats. Unless that process can be fundamentally improved, the nation will have a hard time meeting its climate goals.

The transmission system in the U.S. is old, doesn’t go where an energy grid powered by clean energy sources needs to go, and isn’t being built fast enough to meet projected demand increases.

Building new transmission lines in the U.S. takes so long — if they are built at all — that electrical transmission has become a roadblock for deploying clean energy.

“Right now, over 1,000 gigawatts worth of potential clean energy projects are waiting for approval — about the current size of the entire U.S. grid — and the primary reason for the bottleneck is the lack of transmission,” Bill Gates wrote in a recent blog post about transmission lines.

The stakes are high.

From 2013 to 2020, transmission line expansion has been about 1 percent per year. To realize the full impact of the historic Inflation Reduction Act to be achieved, that pace must more than double to an average of 2.3 percent per year, according to a Princeton report lead by professor Jesse Jenkins, who is a macro-scale energy systems engineer.

Building new transmission lines requires countless stakeholders to come together and hash out a compromise about where a line will run and who will pay for it.

There are 3,150 utility companies in the United States, the U.S. Energy Information Administration told CNBC, and for transmission lines to be constructed, each of the impacted utilities, their respective regulators, and the landowners who will host a line have to agree where the line will go and how to pay for it, according to their own respective rules.

Aubrey Johnson, a vice president of system planning for the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, one of seven regional planning agencies in the United States, compared his work to making a patchwork quilt from pieces of cloth.

“We are patching and connecting all these different pieces, all of these different utilities, all of these different load serving entities, and really trying to look at what works best for the greatest good and trying to figure out how to resolve the most issues for the most amount of people,” Johnson told CNBC.

Sometimes, the parties at the negotiating table have competing interests. For example, an environmental group is likely to disagree with stakeholders who advocate for more power generation from a…