OVER the weekend, I read an article from one of my innumerable energy-related news subscriptions, a newsletter called Utility Dive, that reported the cancellation by the US Department of Energy on Aug. 12 of three major transmission projects. As much eye-rolling as the Department of Energy here provokes for me, our DOE looks like a council of learned sages compared to its US counterpart under the current regime of President Smiley Face Drawn on an Overripe Cantaloupe. Nevertheless, whatever encouragement the Philippines’ energy leadership may take from this, they still should take heed of the object lesson in letting shallow politics affect critical infrastructure decisions.
Back in 2024, the US DOE under the Biden administration, recognizing — a bit late, frankly — the rapidly developing deficiency in transmission across the country, devised a designation for projects called “National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor” (NIETC). A project given this designation would have fast-tracked approval, in some cases allowing the federal government to override state government regulators, and unlock additional financing, mostly in the form of government guarantees backing public-private partnerships. We have a somewhat analogous concept here (although the mechanisms to carry it out haven’t been developed yet) in the designation of Priority Projects for Transmission described in the PH DOE Department Circular (DC) 2026-02-0007 issued in February of this year.
According to the US DOE — in information that has been mostly taken down from its website since the latest decision — an NIETC designation defines “an area of the country where the agency has determined the lack of adequate transmission harms consumers and that the development of new transmission would advance important national interests in that area, such as increased reliability and reduced consumer costs.” The three cancelled projects, called the Lake Erie-Canada Corridor, the Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor and the Tribal Energy Access Corridor were intended to “provide needed resource adequacy support to the PJM Interconnection, cross-interconnection and interregional connections between the Southwest Power Pool and WestConnect regions, and facilitate Tribal energy and economic development by addressing a lack of extra high-voltage transmission.”
In the US, there are actually eight major transmission grid regions. PJM Interconnection is the biggest by number of customers, serving all or part of 13 states in the Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest regions; the Lake Erie-Canada Corridor was supposed to be an additional high-capacity connection to power coming from the Canadian province of Ontario, which supplies much of the power for the northeastern US. The Southwest Power Pool, despite its name, covers much of the central US, stretching from the northern part of Texas up into the Dakotas; the Tribal Access Energy Corridor would have been a network of new transmission lines extending from Nebraska into North and South Dakota, mostly crossing Native American lands. The Southwest Grid Connector Corridor would have been an additional transmission corridor in the eastern part of Western Power Pool, which covers most of the western US states except California, stretching from southern New Mexico into southeastern Colorado.
In the statement over the signature of US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, the DOE said that it would not move forward with the NIETC designation for the three projects, effectively killing them, because “the corridors were selected as a means to advance the Biden administration’s Green New Scam agenda,” a reference to previous policies to boost renewable energy and sustainability developments.
“Transmission policy must serve the American people,” Wright said in the release, “not special interests or a climate-alarmist agenda that drives up costs, worsens reliability, and disregards the concerns of local communities.” The statement went on to the say that “the current designation framework proved ineffective in strengthening grid reliability and reducing electricity costs. In some communities, it also contributed to confusion and concern about the scope and intent of NIETC authority.”
One must be a sociopathic man-child to serve in the Trump administration, which is why Chris Wright, formerly a B-list oil executive, has kept his job for as long as he has.
There are three reasons for the rejection of the three transmission projects, and none of them have anything to do with grid reliability, reducing electricity costs, or governance. The Lake Erie-Canada Corridor was canceled because it would have given PJM another connection to both the Ontario and New York grids; Canada has demonstrated itself to be insufficiently subservient to the Angry Orange, and New York is run by godless communists, so they’re out.
The Tribal Energy Access Corridor and the Southwest Grid Connector Corridor were aggressively resisted by the cattle producers’ trade association R-CALF, which complained that the new transmission projects would interfere with grazing lands and lands used for hay production. Both of those reasons are complete BS; cattle can graze just fine beneath power lines, and most of the land involved is federal land, anyway. And the hay (alfalfa) farms that might have been affected are largely owned by the Saudis.
In addition, the fact that the Tribal Energy Access Corridor would have benefited Native American lands made that project a no-go as far as the current regime is concerned, as those people are non-white and mostly not extremist Christian evangelicals. Furthermore, the area of southern New Mexico that was intended to be connected by the Southwest Grid Connector is a solar energy hotspot, so supporting that in any way would run counter to current official US policy that climate change is a hoax and renewable energy is for the effete.
The US DOE’s decision will only shoot the US in the foot; both feet, as a matter of fact. It will hamstring capacity and grid development to support data centers and other tech industries, and handicap RE development, which is a useful supplement to increasingly unstable hydropower in the drought-stricken western states. And it is a healthy economic driver in an economy that, quite frankly, is not otherwise in good shape thanks to the regime’s other policy choices.
The lesson in this for us here in the Philippines, of course, is that energy policy planning — or for that matter, any other kind of fundamental infrastructure — has to be kept apolitical. This is especially important for energy infrastructure, where development timelines quite often exceed the political term. As it regards grid development in particular, there has for the past 15 years an undercurrent of jingoism among policymakers and legislators — conveniently overlooking that the thing that bothers them now was a result of their own choice in the first place — it has gotten worse under the current leadership of the DOE, and is most likely the unspoken reason for the promulgation of DC 2026-02-0007 in the first place. That’s dangerous and the responsible parties should knock it off, because the unintended consequences would be far more severe and long-lasting.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Bluesky: @benkritz.bsky.social
Website: www.badmannersgunclub.com
