Case Study: How BAAJA's Grid Section Would Change Transmission Delivery for U.S. Industry

By Michael Torres — Industrial Weekly | WorldIndustrialWeekly

Direct answer: the grid section of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act would not produce a single megawatt on its own. Its value to industrial operators is time. It attacks the three bottlenecks that decide when a plant, warehouse or electrified process finally gets firm power — long-line permitting, regional and interregional planning, and monopoly utility incentives.

The unusual part is the level of agreement. On Thursday, October 29, Robinson Meyer opened a Shift Key episode by saying the biggest story in U.S. energy policy, aside from the upcoming midterm elections, was that Congress will take up bipartisan permitting reform next month. The package was advanced in September by four senators. Coverage on Heatmap, Instagram Reels, and social media had shown how controversial the broader bill is; the episode itself is distributed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube. This piece reads the grid section the way an industrial planner would: as a delivery problem, replayed against three real cases — a regional plan that moved, a corridor that never moved, and an equipment queue that moved on its own clock.

What exactly is the consensus around?

Conclusion first: the transmission provisions are the part of the package that skeptics, utilities and clean-energy groups can all defend, which is why they are worth reading separately from the environmental-review fight.

Meyer noted that environmentalists, climate activists, and clean-energy advocates have argued over the bill since it came out because it would encourage power-grid expansion, change environmental review laws, make clean energy and pipelines easier to build, and make it harder for presidents to revoke some energy permits. Still, many people involved agree that the grid policies are very good. The Natural Resources Defense Council described that section as one of the bill's “green flags,” while John Podesta, the former Biden climate advisor, called it “pretty strong” and suggested it could be worth passing if negotiators addressed his other criticisms.

That reading has held since. In an assessment published 26 October 2026, the NRDC argued the bill makes major interstate power lines easier to build by strengthening federal authority over large interstate transmission lines — the same mechanism that critics of permitting reform call the most troubling part of the package outside the grid title. Meyer said journalists often cover conflict because it can be useful for testing disputed questions, but that can reduce attention to important issues where disagreement is limited.

Why does a manufacturing or data-centre reader care about transmission law?

Because the binding constraint on new industrial power has shifted from “is there capacity?” to “when does the wire arrive?”

Three public data points frame the gap:

• Pace of build. In 2024, only 322 miles of new high-voltage line at 345 kV and above were completed in the U.S. — the third slowest year of construction in 15 — according to the “Fewer New Miles” analysis published by Americans for a Clean Energy Grid and Grid Strategies in July 2025, which puts the required pace at roughly 5,000 miles a year. A year earlier, Grid Strategies cited FERC data showing just 55 miles of that voltage class finished in 2023.
• Demand waiting on the wire. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Queued Up tracker recorded about 2,300 GW of generation and storage actively seeking grid connection at the end of 2024, easing to just over 2,060 GW by end-2025 after roughly 750 GW of withdrawals — a sign that the queue is being pruned by delay, not resolved.
• Physical hardware. A June 2024 report prepared for CISA's National Infrastructure Advisory Council noted that power transformer lead times had stretched from around 50 weeks in 2021 to about 120 weeks on average in 2024; Wood Mackenzie's second-quarter 2025 survey put standard power transformers at roughly 128 weeks, with generator step-up units longer.

Put together, an operator can now be told “yes” on siting and “yes” on generation, and still lose three to five years to corridor delivery and substation equipment. That is the delivery clock BAAJA is aimed at.

Who really decides what gets built?

Conclusion: incentives, not ideology, drive utility capital allocation — and the monopoly franchise is the asset being protected.

To explore the less contested grid section, Meyer spoke with David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog and research group that investigates fossil fuel and monopoly utility lobbying. Pomerantz has been at the institute for more than 10 years, and his earlier background was in climate activism: he spent eight years at Greenpeace and became a senior climate campaigner. Meyer referred to him as Dave, and Robinson, the host, is the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.

EPI mixes investigative work, analysis and communications around documenting the harms monopoly utilities pose to ratepayers and to the fossil-to-clean transition. Pomerantz said he got into this work a little over a decade ago, when the climate community already understood the two-part equation — decarbonise electricity, then electrify everything else. By the end of the last decade his exposure to utility organisation and incentives had widened the agenda beyond decarbonisation into good government, campaign finance, concentration of economic power and cost spillovers, because electricity is a base input for the rest of the economy.

Utilities are not one bloc. About two-thirds of America is served by investor-owned electric utilities, corporations owned by investors on Wall Street. The other third is split between cooperative utilities, mostly in rural America, and municipal utilities. Incentives still vary inside the investor-owned group: some companies only sell and distribute electricity, while others also own gas utilities, a pattern that became more common through mergers and acquisitions over the last couple of decades.

Berkshire Hathaway Energy is the sharpest illustration. Berkshire Hathaway, their pipeline group, runs about 20,000 miles of pipe and moves about 15% of the gas consumed in the U.S. in 2024, and also owns a majority stake in the LNG terminal Cove Point. Because of that structure, people running electric utilities may be relatively positive about electrification, while people running gas pipelines may not be.

Pomerantz's core argument is that most electric utilities are relatively positive on electrification and mixed on decarbonisation, but that commentators on both sides overindex decarbonisation as the defining principle. The most valuable commodity for a utility, he said, is its monopoly, which pushes some utilities in blue states to accept faster renewable transition while seeking a reification of franchise rights. He described the tradeoff in a sentence worth keeping in front of any regulator: “Yeah, we can dance with decarbonization a little bit, but we want to increase our ownership share of that new clean energy system of assets that we're going to build.”

Meyer framed the franchise as a rare corporate right in American law, rooted in the observation that the grid is a natural monopoly. Society prefers one provider of wires to avoid duplicative infrastructure. The arrangement dates from when distributed electricity was new in the early 20th century, when competing companies strung so much wire in parts of New York City that the sky could be obscured. As Meyer put it, the monopoly works like a jurisdiction: “In this geographic area, only one company can provide electricity service. No other company can do it.” Pomerantz added that an antitrust debate continues over whether the rationale still holds, since competition has now been introduced into generation, billing and customer relationships in different parts of the country, often with good effect.

Case replay 1 — MISO's $22 billion answer to a planning problem

Stage	What happened	Industrial read-through
Problem	Planning fragmented across regional operators with different rules; multi-value projects stalled on cost allocation.	Site selection models built on one region's assumptions break when load grows in another.
Process	MISO's board approved a roughly $22 billion regional transmission plan on 13 December 2024, with a new 765-kV backbone; the full expansion programme was projected near $30 billion, and MTEP24 describes a region of nearly 77,000 miles of high-voltage line and about 190,000 MW of capacity.	Backbone build is visible years ahead — useful for 5-year capacity planning.
Result	Higher-voltage circuits carry several times the transfer capability of 345-kV lines at lower cost per megawatt-mile, improving project economics in the corridor.	Land, steel and conductor are now a long-lead budgeting item for industrial real estate.

Lesson: the constraint that this case removed was planning and cost allocation, not permitting. BAAJA's consolidated-planning provisions are the direct descendant of that logic.

Case replay 2 — the interregional line that never gets built

Turning to the bill, Meyer said its biggest effect on the power grid may be transmission provisions, a topic he has covered over the past several years. Pomerantz said the bill is ambitious in reforming how transmission is planned, permitted, paid for and controlled. For long, high-voltage lines that connect regions — critical for the energy transition and for cost and reliability — America is building very few regional or interregional lines; building has basically ground to a halt.

The interregional segment is the clearest failure mode. MISO and SPP ran a joint study in 2022 that priced multiple interregional projects at roughly $1.65 billion, yet delivery has lagged; an analysis published 24 September 2026 by Brattle concluded that the two regions' joint planning process may still undervalue interregional transmission. Same story north-south: Pomerantz noted that interregional transmission crossing between regions, such as from PJM to MISO, is basically not being built.

Why: regional transmission organizations did not exist until reforms that started in the late 1990s. For the 20th century, utilities largely decided on their own whether a transmission line was needed, and the country has been on an incomplete journey toward moving transmission control into the public sphere. PJM, covering the mid-Atlantic states and the eastern part of the Midwest, and MISO, extending through more Great Plains-like parts of the Midwest, plan differently — which would not be the design if starting from scratch. BAAJA would advance consolidated planning, getting the country's grid regions to plan in congruent ways.

Case replay 3 — the equipment queue behind the corridor

Even approved projects meet the supply chain. Beyond the transformer lead times cited above, DOE's 2024 guidance has pointed to extra-high-voltage transformer deliveries extending toward 60 months in tight segments. For an industrial team, this means the corridor and the substation equipment must be treated as one critical path: a permit decision in year one and a transformer slot reserved in year two can arrive in the same month as the conductor — or three years apart.

How the bill's permitting machinery would work

Conclusion: the operative change is a federal fallback plus concurrent filing, not a blanket override of states.

Currently, a long line crossing multiple states must be permitted by each state it crosses. The bill would let federal regulators step in and approve a line if one state says no or takes too long and the regulators find it benefits the public. They cannot do it capriciously. For lines of 345 KV or more, the bill would allow parallel filing at FERC while the line also seeks state permission, making permitting easier.

Legal and policy summaries published since the Senate text appeared add precision and risk. A Congressional Research Service In Focus note dated 14 October 2026 states that FERC may issue construction permits only in areas designated as National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors by the Department of Energy, and transmission counsel at Foley Hoag wrote on 15 October 2026 that FERC would be required to issue a permit where it finds a project necessary in the national interest and a state has denied or unduly delayed it. The Bipartisan Policy Center's 3 October 2026 explainer emphasised that the bill codifies a federal transmission planning framework that folds into FERC's permitting. Industry's reading is narrower than advocates' — as one Senate-bill analysis in Utility Dive put it, the backstop proceeding running alongside the state proceeding effectively changes who controls the timetable. For planners, the residual question is whether corridor designation and national-interest findings are issued on a schedule that a capital project can rely on.

What is the political moment doing?

Former officials from six presidential administrations wrote to congressional leaders on 21 October 2026 urging permitting action, arguing that U.S. competitiveness in energy-intensive technology now depends on infrastructure delivery; a coalition of more than 130 business, labour and civic groups followed on 22 October 2026. That cross-partisan pressure is the reason Pomerantz's institutional critique and the bill's transmission fixes sit in the same debate — and the reason the grid title may survive even if other provisions do not.

Five misconceptions that cost industrial teams time

1. “Permitting reform means power is available next year.” The provisions change the approval clock, not the steel, conductor and transformer clock.
2. “Utilities oppose electrification.” Most are relatively positive on electrification; what they optimise is franchise share, which shapes who owns new assets.
3. “Planning is not our problem.” Regional backbones determine where firm capacity and congestion charges will land by the late 2020s.
4. “Greenfield line is the only answer.” Grid-enhancing technologies and reconductoring are cheaper and faster: ESIG's 2025 assessment notes advanced conductor cost is often under 5% of a project's total, and NCSL reports hardware upgrades can raise capacity by up to about 110% on existing rights-of-way.
5. “A signed interconnection agreement equals delivery.” The 2025 queue decline shows agreements withdrawn under delay pressure.

Action list for operations, procurement and capital projects

• Model two clocks. Track approval timelines separately from equipment lead times (120–128 weeks for standard power transformers as the planning baseline) in every capacity case.
• Reserve equipment early. Put transformer and breaker slots into framework contracts before the corridor is finalised; treat supplier capacity as a hedge.
• Screen the corridor map. Check whether your load centre sits inside a regional backbone plan or a potential federal corridor; that changes reliability, congestion exposure and tariff risk.
• Bid the alternative. Put reconductoring, dynamic line rating and power-flow control on the same shortlist as a new circuit; it can be the only option that fits a construction window.
• Write the contract to the grid. Make milestone-based power availability an explicit condition in site-selection and incentive agreements.

FAQ

Does the grid section of the bill guarantee new transmission?

No. It changes who can approve a line, how quickly, and how regions plan together. Delivery still depends on corridor designation, national-interest findings, financing and equipment availability.

Why do environmental groups back only part of the package?

Because transmission is where decarbonisation, reliability and cost arguments overlap. The grid section is what the Natural Resources Defense Council called a set of “green flags,” while the same advocates contest the environmental-review and judicial-review provisions elsewhere in the bill.

What is the single most useful metric for an operations manager?

Months from energisation request to firm delivery. Today that number is set less by substation capacity than by miles of high-voltage line added per year — 322 miles in 2024 against an estimated need near 5,000 — and by transformer lead times above two years.

If only the grid title passes, does anything change for industry?

Materially, yes: consolidated planning and FERC's backstop for lines of 345 KV or more are the provisions that govern regional capacity growth. The pipeline and review-law provisions mostly affect other sectors' schedules.

Where should readers look for verification?

Start with the DOE National Transmission Needs Study, FERC's regional planning filings, LBNL's Queued Up tracker, and CRS's summary of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act rather than vendor commentary.

Sources and further reading

• Shift Key episode with Robinson Meyer and David Pomerantz, 29 October 2026 — available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and YouTube via Heatmap News.
• Energy and Policy Institute — utility watchdog research.
• Americans for a Clean Energy Grid / Grid Strategies, “Fewer New Miles,” July 2025 — https://cleanenergygrid.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/ACEG_Grid-Strategies_Fewer-New-Miles-2025_Rev-1.pdf
• Utility Dive, “MISO board approves $22B regional transmission plan with 765-kV lines,” 13 December 2024 — https://www.utilitydive.com/news/miso-regional-transmission-expansion-plan-2024-mtep/735483/
• LBNL, Queued Up interconnection tracker — https://emp.lbl.gov/queues
• CISA National Infrastructure Advisory Council draft report on power transformer shortages, June 2024 — https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/DRAFT_NIAC_Addressing%20the%20Critical%20Shortage%20of%20Power%20Transformers%20to%20Ensure%20Reliability%20of%20the%20U.S.%20Grid_Report_06052024_508c.pdf
• Wood Mackenzie on transformer lead times — https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/supply-shortages-and-an-inflexible-market-give-rise-to-high-power-transformer-lead-times/
• Brattle, MISO–SPP interregional planning analysis, 24 September 2026 — https://www.brattle.com/insights-events/publications/brattle-analysis-finds-miso-spp-planning-process-may-undervalue-interregional-transmission/
• Congressional Research Service In Focus, BAAJA, 14 October 2026 — https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12746
• Bipartisan Policy Center explainer on the Senate permitting bill, 3 October 2026 — https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/explaining-the-senate-permitting-bill-the-bipartisan-american-affordability-and-jobs-act/
• NRDC assessment of BAAJA, 26 October 2026 — https://www.nrdc.org/media/nrdc-assessment-baaja-2026-permitting-transmission-bill
• ESIG, “Utility Perspectives on Making Grid-Enhancing Technologies Routine,” 2025 — https://www.esig.energy/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/ESIG-Grid-Enhancing-Technologies-report-2025.pdf
• NCSL, Grid-Enhancing Technologies — https://www.ncsl.org/energy/grid-enhancing-technologies
• U.S. Department of Energy, National Transmission Needs Study — https://www.energy.gov/oe/national-transmission-needs-study
• Recharge, former officials from six administrations urge permitting reform, 21 October 2026 — https://www.rechargenews.com/policy/former-us-officials-from-six-administrations-urge-permitting-reform/2-1-2061611

Reporting for WorldIndustrialWeekly by Michael Torres, Industrial Weekly. Corrections, documents and tips: news@industrialweekly.com