Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- The North American electric grid is the largest machine in the world, but it’s showing its age, specifically a critical dearth of high-voltage transmission lines.
- Reports call for 5,000 miles of new transmission annually by 2050, but the last 5,000 miles of lines in the U.S. took nine years to build.
- A new bipartisan bill introduced last week could speed up transmission line permitting—if it passes.
As AI data centers consume ever more energy—and show no signs of slowing—the U.S. electric grid is struggling to catch up. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Pacific Northwest, where Washington and Oregon, two states with sustainability bona fides, rank dead last in bringing renewable projects online. But that isn’t for lack of trying.
The federal Bonneville Power Administration, which operates high-voltage transmission lines in the region, hasn’t built out capacity to bring renewable energy projects online, and that could have lasting impacts for the region.
“The people who, technically speaking, are in charge of our transmission system are dropping the ball,” Oregon state Rep. Mark Gamba told Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB). “We are absolutely looking at rolling blackouts, and we are absolutely looking at not hitting any of our climate targets when it comes to energy production.”
This problem isn’t unique to the Pacific Northwest, nor is it a new one. This dearth of transmission lines has arguably plagued the electric grid for years, but the problem is growing glaringly acute as power-hungry data centers feast on public utilities around the country. In the case of Oregon, for example, a recent report stated that one-quarter of the state’s power goes to data centers. In October 2024, under the Biden Administration, the Department of Energy (DOE) estimated that the U.S. would need to double or even quadruple its transmission capacity by 2050.
In a new article for Yale Climate Connections, environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli notes that to achieve that goal, the U.S. would need to build 5,000 miles of transmission lines a year, but the last 5,000 miles of transmission lines took nine years to complete. So far, the federal government doesn’t appear to be up to the task. The Biden administration identified three corridors for building out transmission lines: the Tribal Energy Access Corridor in the upper midwest, the Lake Erie-Canada corridor, and the Southwestern Grid Connector. These are known as the National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors (NIETCs), but earlier this summer, the U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright announced that the government “will not move forward” with these NIETCs.
“Transmission policy must serve the American people—not special interests or a climate-alarmist agenda that drives up costs, worsens reliability, and disregards the concerns of local communities,” Wright said in a press statement. Confusingly, Wright’s own Office of Electricity released a draft of its 2026 National Transmission Needs Study weeks earlier, saying that NIETCs “use valuable federal financing and permitting tools to spur construction or modification of transmission facilities.”
As Nuccitelli notes, in 2024 Congress failed to pass the Energy Permitting Reform Act, which would cut DOE out of the permitting process and allow projects to go directly to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), effectively removing the political back-and-forth that occurs between administrations. FERC’s new Order No. 1920 also requires “the nation’s transmission providers to plan for the transmission we know we will need in the future.”
While the future looks grim for curtailing climate emissions, building out infrastructure that can connect new clean energy projects as they come online could stop billions of tons of pollution in just the next 15 years, according to Yale Climate Connections. A new bill called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act aims to do just that by “giving the federal government more authority to approve major interstate power lines” while forcing data centers to pay for their transmission costs.
However, if the past is any indicator, it’s far from certain that this bill will eventually become law.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.