DOE proposal may be largest land grab in US history

This appears to be barely disguised large-scale eminent domain.

On May 9, 2023, the US Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office published a notice that lays out the basic regulatory framework to redesign and greatly expand the US electric power grid. This DOE notice is a typical federal government document, full of legalese and gobbledegook, but essentially says its purpose is to provide public notice of the process which DOE is developing to redesign and expand the US electric power grid. The public comment period has been extended to July 31, 2023.

A link in this document takes the reader to another document that describes the process that DOE will be following to build new electric transmission lines, which are the high voltage, cross-country electric transmission lines. While not explicitly stated, the project DOE is describing will consist of new transmission lines to connect wind and solar farms in the hinterlands to the cities, plus additional transmission lines to improve the interconnections between regional power grids.

The terminology in the document will make your head spin, but a hint of where this federal initiative is headed is the statement that the proposed framework:

…unlocks critical federal investment and regulatory and permitting tools to spur urgent transmission investments needed in these geographic areas to improve reliability and resilience and reduce consumer costs.

The phrase “unlocks critical federal investment and regulatory and permitting tools” to get new transmission lines built should get your attention. What are these regulatory and permitting tools? DOE doesn’t say outright, so we will have to speculate.

Based on various statements in the DOE documents, the new power lines that DOE proposes to build by 2035 will be a 57% expansion of the existing power grid. DOE says the expansion will require 47,300 gigawatt miles of new transmission, but gigawatt miles is not a commonly used metric, so let’s focus on a 57% expansion of the existing power grid. This will require many thousands of miles of new high-voltage lines as well as new “transfer capacity” between regions and other related infrastructure. This is a massive project on a scale never before attempted in the US or anywhere else in the world.

We do not yet know how DOE and other federal agencies will accomplish this task, but one thing for sure is that it is going to require huge amounts of land—tens of thousands of miles of it comprising millions of acres. Has such a massive land-use project been tried in the US? In fact, it has. In 1956, under President Eisenhower, the “Federal-aid Highway Act of 1956” was enacted to facilitate the construction of what we know as the 41,000-mile interstate highway system. This federal legislation gave the federal government the power of eminent domain, which was used extensively to take private land.

History.com describes how the interstate highway system was built:

On June 29, 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. The bill created a 41,000-mile “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways” that would, according to Eisenhower, eliminate unsafe roads, inefficient routes, traffic jams and all of the other things that got in the way of “speedy, safe transcontinental travel.” At the same time, highway advocates argued, “in case of atomic attack on our key cities, the road net [would] permit quick evacuation of target areas.” For all of these reasons, the 1956 law declared that the construction of an elaborate expressway system was “essential to the national interest.

The DOE proposal to designate “National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors” sounds very similar to the 1956 statement that the highway system was “essential to the national interest. The DOE appears to be taking the first step toward the largest use of eminent domain ever attempted in this country to seize private property from landowners that most likely do not want high-voltage power lines running through it.

I hope I am wrong, and I will be monitoring and reporting on this developing story. I will report more details as they become available.