What Permits are Needed for New Electricity Transmission Lines?

What Permits are Needed for New Electricity Transmission Lines?

What Permits are Needed for New Electricity Transmission Lines?

Imagine that you want to build a new electricity transmission line, so that the power generated by new solar or wind projects can be transmitted over the grid to where it is needed.

The Permitting Institute provides the following helpful figure to show the process, although you may need to expand the figure on your screen or go to the original source to read the steps. As noted in small type at the bottom, the figure only includes federal requirements, and so state and local permitting issues would be in addition to these. If you consider yourself a supporter of trying to electrify multiple sectors of the economy–electricity, transportation, heating and cooling of buildings, manufacturing processes–with a major expansion of solar and wind power, the electrical grid will need to perhaps triple in size in the next few decades. From that standpoint, this process in the figure is a problem. 

Federal_Permitting_Process_Flowchart_for_a_Transmission_Project.jpg

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Timothy Taylor

Global Economy Expert

Timothy Taylor is an American economist. He is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a quarterly academic journal produced at Macalester College and published by the American Economic Association. Taylor received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Haverford College and a master's degree in economics from Stanford University. At Stanford, he was winner of the award for excellent teaching in a large class (more than 30 students) given by the Associated Students of Stanford University. At Minnesota, he was named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Department of Economics and voted Teacher of the Year by the master's degree students at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Taylor has been a guest speaker for groups of teachers of high school economics, visiting diplomats from eastern Europe, talk-radio shows, and community groups. From 1989 to 1997, Professor Taylor wrote an economics opinion column for the San Jose Mercury-News. He has published multiple lectures on economics through The Teaching Company. With Rudolph Penner and Isabel Sawhill, he is co-author of Updating America's Social Contract (2000), whose first chapter provided an early radical centrist perspective, "An Agenda for the Radical Middle". Taylor is also the author of The Instant Economist: Everything You Need to Know About How the Economy Works, published by the Penguin Group in 2012. The fourth edition of Taylor's Principles of Economics textbook was published by Textbook Media in 2017.

   
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