About a year ago, one of the worst things that can happen to any climate journalist happened to me: I started to care about power lines. I began to ca

Manchin’s New Bill Could Lead to One Big Climate Win

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2022-09-22 16:30:36

About a year ago, one of the worst things that can happen to any climate journalist happened to me: I started to care about power lines.

I began to care, specifically, about transmission lines, the subset of power lines that traverse great distances and carry electricity from one region of the country to another. You’ve definitely seen transmission lines—they run along those steel structures you sometimes notice on the highway, unlike distribution lines, which hang from telephone poles and connect to your house. (Thankfully, I do not care about distribution lines.) In the world of climate policy, caring about electricity transmission is roughly like developing a sincere rooting interest in the New York Jets: You have chosen to suffer.

Transmission lines are the circulatory system of America’s power grid. Lately, that grid has been very sick. The U.S. experienced 64 percent more power outages in the last decade than it did during the decade prior, according to a new study from Climate Central, a nonprofit research group. That’s in part because the grid is getting old. Most of the country’s roughly 437,000 miles of transmission lines were built in the 1950s or 1960s and designed to last 50 years; those lines are now reaching the end of their life in a hotter, stormier, and more extreme climate than they were built for.

Even if the grid was holding up fine, though, we would still need more lines. We need to electrify most of the economy in order to eliminate carbon pollution; by 2050, the country must build new transmission lines at twice the pace it does today, according to Princeton’s Net-Zero America report.