The Biden energy plan rests a rickety three-legged stool

See All Biden Has to Do Now Is Change the Way We Live by Ezra Klein. Excerpts:

"right now, 60 percent of electricity comes from fossil fuels. We need to rebuild our electrical grid around clean sources, and then we need to triple or quadruple the total amount of electricity we generate.

“A lot of that needs to be built where the resource is,” Liza Reed, an electricity transmission expert at the Niskanen Center, told me, “where the solar is, or the wind is, or the geothermal is. So you need to move that power around from the places it’s generated.” That means building many, many more power lines than we currently have. But the way we presently build transmission lines is a mess.

To spend significant time tracing the way transmission lines are built is to wish you didn’t have a job in which you needed to spend time tracing the way transmission lines are built. There is no federal agency with the power to plan and build a national transmission system. Authority is split between federal, state and local regulators — in Oklahoma, for instance, each municipality can independently decide if and where a power line gets built.

Transmission projects often come in late, and over budget, and many planned projects stall out. A 2016 report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory looked at five major transmission projects with projected completion dates by 2021. Only one of them has been completed. Construction hasn’t even begun on the other four.

“Money is not the only barrier to transmission infrastructure,” Reed said. “It’s been a problem and contentious when it comes to transmission, but it’s not, I would say, the most significant barrier to getting transmission built.”

There is no single framework for planning or community participation, and there is no accepted approach to compensating the communities or states that host infrastructure from which they don’t directly benefit (this is a good overview, if you’re looking for some light bedtime reading). There have been past efforts to give federal regulators more power over the process — particularly in the 2005 Energy Policy Act — but that authority often collapsed when challenged in court. There is some money in the Inflation Reduction Act to nudge regulators and utilities to be more ambitious and cooperative, but there are no dramatic new authorities or structures to make what was impossible yesterday possible tomorrow.

And that’s just transmission. The center of our decarbonization strategy is an almost unimaginably large buildup of wind and solar power. To put some numbers to that: A plausible path to decarbonization, modeled by researchers at Princeton, sees wind and solar using up to 590,000 square kilometers — which is roughly equal to the land mass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee put together. “The footprint is very, very large, and people don’t really understand that,” Danny Cullenward, co-author of “Making Climate Policy Work,” told me."