Government funds $306 million for 400-mile electrical transmission line across Oklahoma

 

A 400-mile high-voltage transmission line from one tip of Oklahoma to the other was among four projects receiving $1.5 billion this week from the U.S. Department of Energy, projects aimed at strengthening the nation’s electricity grid.

Supported by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and administered through DOE’s Grid Deployment Office (GDO), the projects selected for the Transmission Facilitation Program will enable nearly 1,000 miles of new transmission development and 7,100 MW of new capacity throughout Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, while creating what the government called “nearly 9,000 good-paying jobs.”

The Oklahoma grid project, worth up to $306 million in government funding, is called the “Cimarron Link” and will stretch from Texas County in the Panhandle to Tulsa in the eastern part of the state. It will be 400 miles in length and consist of a high-voltage direct-current or HVDC line transmitting 1,900 MC of capacity from wind and solar operations.

The Energy Department said the Cimarron Link will deliver electrical power to “growing load centers” in eastern Oklahoma and elsewhere in the Southwest Power Pool. It will reportedly create more than 3,600 construction jobs and 20 permanent operations job.

The line is very much like the $4.5 billion Wind Catcher project proposed by American Electric Power to capture electricity from wind farms in Texas and Oklahoma and transmit it to the Tulsa area. But when Texas regulators denied approval in the summer of 2018, AEP pulled the plug on the entire project. At the time, AEP said it would have been construction of the largest wind farm in the country. Regulators in Arkansas and Louisiana had approved the project but it was pending before Oklahoma Corporation Commissioners.

The Wind Catcher project also called for the construction of a 360-mile transmission line from the wind farm to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the company said the existing electric grid would deliver power from the farm to customers.

In May, the federal government announced the proposal of 10 electric transmission pathways to expand the nation’s power grid and called the line stretching Oklahoma the Delta Plains. It was described as a 645-mile long corrdidor stretching from the Oklahoma Panhandle to Arkansas. It was described as an interregional corridor between the Southwest Power Pool and Midcontinent Independent System operator that could facilitate cross-interconnection transmission.

The three other projects include in the announcement this week were:

  • Southern Spirit will construct a new 320-mile HVDC line connecting the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid for the first time with electric grids in the southeastern U.S. power markets, including Midcontinent Independent System Operator South (MISO-S) and Southern Company (SOCO), which will enhance reliability and prevent outages during extreme weather events, like Winter Storm Uri that hit Texas in 2022. This line across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi will provide 3,000 MW of bidirectional capacity and create 850 construction jobs and 305 permanent operations jobs. (up to $360 million potential contract value)
  • Southline will construct a new 108-mile transmission line that will deliver 1,000 MW of new, bidirectional capacity between Hidalgo County, New Mexico and Las Cruces, New Mexico, creating at least 150 new construction jobs and helping meet energy needs of industries investing in the region, including semiconductor, battery manufacturing, and data center facilities. (up to $352 million potential contract value). Today’s new selection is for Phase 2 of the Southline Project, following the prior selection of Southline Phase 1, a 175-mile line from Hidalgo County, New Mexico to Pima County, Arizona in the first round of the Transmission Facilitation Program.
  • Aroostook Renewable Project will construct a new substation in Haynesville, Maine and a 111-mile transmission line with a capacity of 1,200 MW to connect the new substation to the Independent System Operator-New England (ISO-NE) system at a substation in Pittsfield, Maine. The project will provide New England with access to low-cost clean energy generated in northern Maine, while creating more than 4,200 construction jobs and 30 permanent operations jobs. (up to $425 million potential contract value)“The U.S. transmission network is the backbone of our nation’s electricity system. Though our grid has served U.S. energy needs for more than a century, our country’s needs are changing,” said U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk. “DOE’s approach to deploying near-term solutions and developing long-term planning tools will ensure our electric grid is more interconnected and resilient than ever before, while also supporting greater electricity demand.

With the announcement following prior selections of Southline Phase 1, the Southwest Intertie Project-North, and the Cross-Tie 500kV Transmission Line Project, nearly all of the legislated $2.5 billion of TFP funding is now committed. GDO will continue to evaluate the TFP revolving fund balance as projects advance in construction and relieve DOE of its current obligations. The program intends to open future funding opportunities when there are sufficient uncommitted funds available.

DOE also released the final National Transmission Planning (NTP) Study, a set of long-term planning tools and analyses that examine a wide range of potential future scenarios through 2050 to identify pathways to maintain grid reliability, increase resilience, and reduce costs, while meeting local, regional, interregional, and national interests and supporting the changing energy landscape. The study finds that the United States will need to approximately double to triple the 2020 transmission capacity by 2050 in order to meet demand growth and reliability needs, and hundreds of billions of dollars of cost savings can be achieved through substantial transmission expansion and interregional planning.