Bedevils

One mega wind project’s 17-year odyssey

By JOEL KIRKLAND and CHRISTIAN ROBLES 

An uncomfortable reality bedevils the Biden administration: U.S. climate goals are almost certainly out of reach if the electric grid can’t deliver more wind and solar power to American cities.

Confronting that challenge for President Joe Biden is John Podesta, a power player in Democratic circles, writes Peter Behr. For much of the past year, he’s pressed members of Biden’s Cabinet, including Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, to clear away federal hurdles to electric transmission projects that would deliver renewable energy across multiple states.

The White House pulled Podesta, now 74, out of retirement to attack the backlog of stalled grid projects — many knotted up by a decade or more of delays. One of those projects, SunZia Wind and Transmission, was originally conceived 17 years ago. The project would ship wind power from nearly 1,000 turbines to be built in central New Mexico to an area just south of energy-hungry Phoenix.

“Oh, my God,” Podesta recalled blurting out. “We’ve gotten nowhere on that?”

It was a jarring flashback to Podesta’s time as then-President Barack Obama’s energy counselor. Shepherding SunZia through the labyrinth of state and local permits had been a priority even back then, Podesta told Pete.

SunZia had faced critics from birders to tribes to the U.S. Army. In all of those cases, careful negotiations and compromises were able to drag the project closer to the starting gate.

With a final push from Podesta and Haaland, Interior’s Bureau of Land Management gave SunZia the green light in May to start building on federal land.

A test for Biden

The $9 billion, 550-mile power line is expecting to deliver more than 3,500 megawatts to sprawling metro areas in the Southwest by 2026.

The White House says SunZia was an opening move in its efforts to sort out the nation’s electricity infrastructure problems. The administration is speeding deployment of more than $30 billion in support for the grid in the 2021 infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law.

With so much push and pull around Biden’s climate policy — Republicans criticizing federal spending on clean energy as some on the left demand faster action — SunZia stood as a test of what the administration could deliver.

But crucial lessons can be learned from SunZia’s nearly two-decade odyssey, according to people such as Podesta and Hunter Armistead, chief executive of Pattern Energy, SunZia’s San Francisco-based project developer.