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Markey’s folly? Senator’s latest environmental crusade could make it harder to build out electric grid infrastructure, desperately needed for decarbonization
It comes with a $200 million price tag and creates a new layer of federal bureaucracy.
Even more worrisome, it sets the fox loose in the henhouse, giving environmental groups like the Conservation Law Foundation a say when it comes to the plans for expanding the electric grid, critics say.
Given that CLF played a key role in thwarting the recently cancelled, $1.6 billion Northern Pass transmission line from Quebec into New Hampshire, that could certainly be a problem.
Welcome to Sen. Edward Markey’s “Better Grid” proposal, a piece of legislation in the making that critics say would do anything but improve the electric grid.
Markey, who last month held a meeting in Boston to drum up support, recently received a rebuke from a regional labor group, the IBEW New England Utility Council.
“Everyone agrees his legislation will be costly and burdensome to the industry,” Michael Monahan, an IBEW international vice president who oversees all the electrician union’s New England locals and the Utility Council, told Contrarian Boston. “Typically, more red tape leaves less money to increase wages and benefits.”
Markey’s proposal would require $200 million to, among other things, create an Office of Transmission within the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The senator’s proposal also gives membership and voting rights in the ISO-New England, the organization that oversees the region’s electric grid and other grid operators like it across the country, to a range of outside nonprofits and activist groups.
These include “consumer advocates, public interest groups … environmental justice communities … and clean energy stake holders,” according to the copy of Markey’s draft legislation.
Not coincidentally, these are also the same groups that are some of the senator’s most ardent supporters since he unveiled his Green New Deal proposal back in 2019.
The proposal turned an aging senator of middling accomplishments into a environmental rock star, helping him fend off a primary challenge from Rep. Joseph Kennedy III.
But here’s the thing: By some estimates, the electric grid will need to be doubled in size in order to accommodate a surge in carbon-free power generated by everything from new off-shore wind farms to nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams.
Yet it’s opposition from NIMBY local opponents and officials, and often lawsuits by environmental groups as well, that have completely derailed some transmission projects while delaying others for years.
Now, just maybe, bringing environmental groups and other critics into the review process for new transmission projects could head off lawsuits farther down the line.
It seems more likely, though, that Markey’s grand scheme will simply give critics of new transmission lines more tools to gum up the works and delay projects.
Weekend snapshot: A roundup of stories that caught our eye
Not exactly profiles in courage: Top Democratic leaders in Massachusetts remain silent on whether Biden should drop out of the race
Yes, that would be Sens. Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren. We are in the midst of a national crisis, with what certainly appears to be an increasingly cognitively hobbled President Biden defiantly refusing to call it a day.
Biden threw down the gauntlet Monday on the “Morning Joe” program, telling would-be presidential contenders in his own party to “challenge me at the convention.”
But the state’s two senators have been silent on this key issue, even as a small but growing number of Democratic leaders across the country step forward to call upon Biden to step aside gracefully.
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