Biden boosted investment in the electric grid. What will Trump do?

President Joe Biden learned to love transmission during his four years in the White House. The question now is whether President-elect Donald Trump will show the same ardor for large power lines when he returns to the Oval Office.

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Biden threw the weight of the presidency behind transmission development as part of a wider effort to green America’s electric grid. But as he enters his final weeks in office, some of Biden’s efforts are still falling into place.

A nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for a massive Midwestern power line is pending. Federal financial support for four major transmission projects worth $1.5 billion is yet to be completed. And two major regional grants worth nearly $640 million, one for transmission upgrades in the Mountain West and another for an offshore wind interconnection in New England, are still in negotiation.

Trump has long been a skeptic of renewable energy and criticized its role as a growing source of American power generation. The president-elect pledged this week to put an end to new “windmills.”

Still, Trump may have his own reasons for backing big power line projects. Technology industry billionaires lined up to fund his campaign for the White House banking on more federal support for their energy-hungry endeavors, including the artificial intelligence boom and cryptocurrency. A high-voltage grid that can move a lot of energy to data centers across the country is critical for scaling up America’s leading industry.

Trump also comes to office as the state of grid reliability is provoking increasing concerns. The nation’s grid watchdog told Congress major transmission expansions are needed to bolster the reliability of an electric grid straining to keep up with demand and to handle assaults by bigger and more frequent storms.

Trump has pledged to dismantle Biden’s clean energy programs and cut the size of government. It’s still unclear whether that extends to transmission. The result is a high-stakes race for major power line projects to finalize federal support in the waning days of Biden’s presidency.

“I’m not worried about it once it’s contracted but I’m definitely worried about it before it’s contracted,” Kate Gordon, a former senior adviser to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, told POLITICO’s E&E News. “Getting money out the door is critical.”

Larry Gasteiger, executive director of WIRES, a trade association supporting grid investment, said the future legal exposure of the Biden grid projects is uncertain.

“I hope these types of projects don’t get bogged down in litigation over whether they can move forward or not, either because of the existence or absence of any binding contracts.“The fact is that we’re going to need a lot of transmission over the next decade or so. Nothing in the change in administrations is going to alter that,” he added.

Development of “big wires” projects had almost ceased by the end of the first Trump administration, declining sharply after 2013. Power demand across the nation had been relatively flat. High-voltage transmission was also getting harder to build: Projects were tied up in decadeslong litigation and NIMBY protests, and state officials were waging battles against long lines.

At the start of the Biden administration four years ago, the need for long-distance transmission hinged on Biden’s aspirational commitment to convert a U.S. power grid dominated by fossil fuels into a net-zero electricity system within 15 years. And this year, a detailed computer analysis from the Department of Energy concluded that a much larger grid would be needed to move green power from one region of the country to another.

Biden sought to give new power lines a boost with billions of dollars in funding and tax incentives from the bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act, an unprecedented clean energy commitment.

DOE created the Grid Deployment Office to oversee transmission investments, which include a $10.5 billion grant program to enhance grid resilience and a $2.5 billion revolving fund to help finance new lines.

DOE approved a $700 million grant to the North Plains Connector in North Dakota and Montana, which would create the first grid connection between the North American eastern and western grid systems currently separated by the Rocky Mountains. Biden also convened a cabinet-level committee headed by senior White House adviser John Podesta that helped push a half dozen big projects through the federal permitting gauntlet, according to a 2023 summary by the consulting firm Grid Strategies for Americans for a Clean Energy Grid.

In all, 10 big wires projects got under construction between 2021 and 2023, reversing years of almost no work on long, regional lines.

“It’s encouraging to see the uptick in development and market interest,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies. “But the clock is running out, given the long time frames of transmission development. We need to be doing a lot more than we are now.”

In an emailed statement, the director of the Grid Deployment Office said DOE had spurred $36.9 billion in public and private investments which will lead to 4,375 miles of new or upgraded transmission capacity by 2031.

“GDO is helping add more energy to the grid faster, improve reliability and resilience, and invest in innovative technologies,” Maria Robinson wrote.

‘Critical reliability challenges’

Even so, more investment is likely needed. The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), the interstate grid’s security monitor, warned last month that most of the U.S. is headed for “critical reliability challenges” this decade unless current supply and demand imbalances improve.

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A recent NERC report estimated that 35,000 megawatts of additional high- voltage line capacity was needed to link major grid regions, allowing more power to flow into a weather-stricken area from neighboring states. In such extreme emergencies, the grid has to be bigger than the weather.

“Simply put, our infrastructure is not being built fast enough to keep up with the rising demand,” said John Moura, NERC director of reliability assessments and performance analysis.

The Biden White House has also increasingly tied grid expansion to the U.S. response to extreme weather. After hurricane winds and flooding savaged the Carolinas and Georgia in September, Podesta said, “You need only to look at the recent devastation of Hurricane Helene to know how the climate crisis is already straining our existing grid infrastructure at the precise moment when we need that infrastructure to be larger, stronger and more reliable.”

Two other storms that rattled regional electric grids in recent years show just how sorely needed new transmission lines are.

In 2021, a brutal Arctic weather front clobbered Texas, freezing power and gas infrastructure, killing at least 240 people and cutting off power to 4.5 million people. It triggered an estimated $11 billion in natural gas price spikes that turned into electricity charges that consumers will be paying for years.

The following year a “bomb cyclone” event combining freezing temperatures and 60-mile-an-hour gusts swept across the top half of the U.S. during Christmas week. It shut down one-third of Appalachian region gas production, creating power emergencies in the mid-Atlantic region with its heavy dependence on gas-fired electric plants.

Duke Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority had to impose rolling blackouts, and a Duke official told North Carolina regulators that not doing so could have triggered a much wider and more dangerous power disruption.

More transmission capacity could have prevented widespread outages. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), grid operator in most of the state, could not bring in power from neighboring states because Texas has chosen to remain outside the federally regulated North American grid.

A Grid Strategies analysis concluded that a single 1,000-megawatt transmission tie between ERCOT and neighboring states could have prevented $1 billion in higher energy charges while keeping power flowing and furnaces working for hundreds of thousands of Texans. The line would have paid for itself immediately.

In Duke’s case, the utility couldn’t prevent the outages during the 2022 winter storm because of limited transmission transfer capacity, analysis by DOE and NERC showed.

Transmission advocates have seized on those challenges, arguing that presidential priorities might shift but the grid’s needs do not.

“Democrats talk about it in terms of energy transition and we need transmission to move new resources around. Republicans need transmission just as much,” said Theodore Paradise, chief policy and grid strategy officer at CTC Global, a conductor manufacturer. “It’s a different side of the same coin: reliability, cost-saving and economic growth.”

DOE and the big grid

New data centers and factories all depend on the ability to hook up to the grid. The speed with which they can do so will help determine the success of Trump’s economic agenda, Paradise said.

Many industry analysts are closely watching for hints of how Trump plans to handle Biden’s transmission initiatives. Atop that list is DOE’s Transmission Facilitation Program (TFP), a $2.5 billion fund that provides financial backing for new power lines.

The program offers what are known as capacity contracts to transmission line developers, where DOE agrees to buy up to half of a line’s power if necessary as the initial “anchor customer” to encourage other power buyers to sign up.

Two of DOE’s power purchase agreements went to Grid United and Black Forest Partners for a 278-mile line connecting Tucson, Arizona, to El Paso, Texas. The infrastructure law allows the Department of Energy to provide an initial purchase guarantee for a project’s electricity. But the U.S. government isn’t meant to be a permanent buyer, said transmission pioneer Michael Skelly, Grid United founder and chief executive.

“A project like this is a few hundred miles long and getting it launched is challenging because it’s so big,” Skelly said in an interview.

“The mechanics of the contract give us all the incentive in the world to get DOE out,” Skelly said. But, he added, having DOE in first “jump-starts this big, half-billion dollar infrastructure project.”

DOE offered contracts to eight power lines, one of which has since been scrapped. Of the remaining seven, three contracts have been finalized: a 285-mile line linking Idaho and Nevada, a 214-mile line connecting existing transmission in Utah and Nevada and the first 175-mile phase of the Southline project. Grid United is in the process of negotiating with DOE on a second, 108-mile phase of the project.

It remains to be seen if the four remaining contracts will be finalized before Biden leaves office. They include a 111-mile line designed to connect a wind-rich area of northern Maine to New England’s electric grid, a 320-mile line linking Texas to Mississippi and a 400-mile line connecting the wind and solar-rich Oklahoma panhandle to Tulsa.

Avangrid, the developer of the Maine project, did not respond to requests for comment. But the developer of Southern Spirit Transmission, the line linking Texas and Mississippi, said the project was critical to avoiding the type of blackouts Texas experienced in 2021.

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The high-voltage direct current line is engineered for two-way power flows, allowing surplus Texas wind power to compete outside its borders and for neighbors’ power to enter the state in emergencies.

“By connecting diverse energy resources and geographies, it will strengthen grid reliability and resiliency, importantly during extreme weather and periods of high electricity consumption,” said Steve Caminati, vice president of government and regulatory affairs at Pattern Energy, which is building the line.

In a recent post on Linkedin, Grid Deployment Office Deputy Director Jeff Dennis hailed the success of the Transmission Facilitation Program, saying DOE had taken it from “a few pages of legislative text to a full-fledged program that spurs the development of new and upgraded transmission projects needed to improve reliability and resilience and reduce energy consumer costs with minimal risk to taxpayers.”

There are some indications that Trump may look favorably on new power lines. When DOE announced $700 million for the North Plains Connector in August, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum welcomed the news calling it a “critical link” between his state and Montana. Trump has tapped Burgum as his nominee to run the Interior Department and lead a new Energy Security Council.

Other money will be difficult for Trump to claw back. Almost $9 billion has been obligated under DOE’s $10.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Program, according to the department. Obligated funds are an important legal distinction making it extraordinarily difficult for Trump to wipe from the books.

DOE officials also expressed confidence that TFP finalized contracts could not be reversed by Trump. “The administration change would not alter the legal effect of the contracts,” Robinson wrote in an email.

Programs like TFP are likely safe from repeal under Trump because they were written into the text of the bipartisan infrastructure law, said Travis Fisher, director of the energy and environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. But the same cannot be said of the Grid Deployment Office, which was created by the Biden administration rather than an act of Congress.

“If you can stand up an office and appoint someone to lead it who didn’t survive Senate confirmation then that is something I would expect to be reformed or removed on Day 1,” said Fisher, who worked at DOE during Trump’s first term.

Robinson, a former Massachusetts state representative, was initially nominated to lead DOE’s Office of Electricity, but her nomination was later withdrawn by the White House after facing criticism from Republican lawmakers.

‘Doesn’t need to be the death knell’

Some projects could come in for additional scrutiny if not completed before Biden leaves office.

In late November, DOE’s Loan Programs Office announced a $4.9 billion conditional loan guarantee for Grain Belt Express to help fund the first leg of the project from southwestern Kansas to central Missouri. The second phase is to connect to Indiana, linking two of the nation’s largest regional power markets.

The deal is part of a wave of recently announced DOE loans which have drawn criticism from Republican lawmakers and Vivek Ramaswamy, the pharmaceutical executive who Trump has tapped to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk.

Invenergy, Grain Belt’s developer, did not respond to requests for comment.

A $389 million grant to New England states could also draw Trump’s ire. The federal money is intended to help fund construction of two offshore wind interconnection points and a long-duration battery in northern Maine. The grid interconnection points in Massachusetts and Connecticut would help connect 4,800 MW of offshore wind to the New England grid, enough to power 2 million homes. But negotiations to finalize the grant are ongoing, potentially leaving the future of the funding of Trump, an outspoken offshore wind critic.

One executive associated with the project, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive business matters, expressed concern the interconnection projects would not move forward without federal assistance.

Danielle Burney, a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said the state is focused on “ensuring Massachusetts receives all of this funding, and we are on track to do so.”

But some transmission advocates said the federal program may have already served its purpose, even if the money does not come through.

“At the highest level, just the availability of federal funding drove collaboration and project ideas that might not have come forward without the prospect of federal money,” said Peter Shattuck, a Massachusetts-based power consultant.

The federal dollars would lower project costs, lessening the impact to ratepayers. But proposals like the New England grant were based on a real need to support additional power generation in the region, Shattuck said.

“It doesn’t need to be the death knell for good transmission projects,” he said. “That is important work that should happen one way or another.”

This story also appears in Climatewire.