Lines That Connect Us: Reimagining Transmission Development Through Community Partnership and Benefits Sharing
In this report, researchers from Data for Progress, the World Resources Institute, and the Great Plains Institute examine the potential for community benefits frameworks (CBFs) to address a central challenge to transmission deployment: local opposition. These frameworks, including community benefits agreements (CBAs) and project labor agreements (PLAs), can be an important tool to ensure that tangible benefits from development projects are felt locally, enable communities to create or fund programs that matter to them, and help developers foster local relationships and earn community acceptance of a project.
The U.S. needs to significantly expand its transmission infrastructure to meet growing electricity demand, enhance grid reliability, and connect renewable energy sources in the coming decades. High-value transmission projects face various barriers, including lengthy permitting processes, cost allocation issues, and local opposition, which often leads to project delays or cancellations. CBFs can offer some tools by which to address local opposition, if transmission developers’ community engagement and community benefits practices are seen as meaningful and trustworthy.
Case studies of merchant-owned transmission lines (SOO Green, Grain Belt Express, North Plains Connector), interviews and surveys, and focus groups in New England and the Great Plains inform the report’s findings and recommendations. Within the report, key findings on the utility of CBFs as a tool for transmission development include:
- Transmission, specifically, is not very familiar to the average American, but the general public is acutely aware of grid reliability challenges and growing energy demand that make it essential to invest in power grid improvements, including transmission upgrades and expansion. Improving grid resilience is seen as essential to prevent disruptions from blackouts, particularly in low-income and rural areas where power restoration can take longer.
- Community concerns about local impacts of transmission projects, such as environmental effects and visual changes, must be addressed to effectively embed community stakeholders as key partners in transmission development and to secure community buy-in for transmission projects. This requires developing a strong understanding of host community considerations, building trust with community stakeholders, and ensuring landowners and community members can share input to meaningfully shape project development.
- Broader goals around reliability and growing demand for energy can feel disconnected from people’s day-to-day lives and energy needs, and thus arguments around these goals do not necessarily defuse local opposition toward proposed transmission projects. Emphasizing the consequences and higher long-term costs that electric utility customers will likely face from a failure to invest in transmission grid expansion and upgrade projects may be effective as a way to connect transmission to the average American’s daily life.
- Community engagement and benefits best practices, both from the transmission sector and other sectors of the economy, are crucial for mitigating local opposition to transmission projects. These include practicing early and transparent communication, prioritizing landowner needs, and offering monetary and non-monetary benefits to the broader host community.
Transmission advocates must ensure communities have a participatory role in shaping transmission projects. Genuine engagement with trusted partners and tangible local benefits secured through CBFs can offer opportunities to overcome opposition and accelerate grid expansion.
