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Why I Can’t Stop Talking About BAAJA 

For the past few weeks, I’ve been telling anyone who will listen — colleagues, friends, my family, my very confused dog— that the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) is the most important thing to happen to the American grid in a generation. I’m basically turning into a Mountain Dew commercial, so I figured I’d write it all down instead. 

When I ran the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program at the Department of Energy (DOE), I was floored by how many utilities applied just to replace poles well past their useful life. We had over 700 applications in that first round, and many were simply about replacing wooden poles and copper wire more than 70 years old. You still see that today in the projects DOE selected as part of its SPARK program, which grew out of GRIP. This is the grid most Americans actually live on — not glossy renderings of new high-voltage lines, but aging wood and steel holding up our homes, hospitals, and businesses. 

We already laid out what BAAJA does for transmission in recent blog, A Smarter, More Connected Grid. I want to talk about the why: why we need this bill, why now, and why this particular compromise.

Why We Need it, And Why Now 

Study after study, from administrations of both parties, shows a stronger grid lowers bills. Demand is growing, old plants get pricier to run every year, and the cheapest new resources still can’t help anyone if they can’t plug in. More than two terawatts of generation and storage are stuck in interconnection queues, with projects walking away because the transmission bill is too high. And a stronger grid is the key to resilience — see: those utility poles. 

The proverb says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now. For the past two decades, we’ve eked out progress in states, RTOs, and at FERC while high voltage transmission slowed to a crawl and other countries built out their grids at a mind-bending pace. Industries, transportation, heating and cooling, and electric power all need a reliable and affordable electric grid. Full stop.  

The price of admission has changed too. EPRA paid for its transmission wins with mandated oil, gas, and coal leasing, a tradeoff the environmental community couldn’t accept. BAAJA takes a different approach, changing timelines and procedures under some of our foundational environmental laws. 

Why This Compromise: Durability is the Point 

BAAJA is a bipartisan bill in a tradition I’d started to think was lost. That’s the most important thing about it. 

We learned this the hard way. Energy infrastructure has been politicized so much that major projects now see stop and start delays that leave communities in limbo. This ends up hurting the communities that benefit from these projects the most: rural and low-income areas are often left wondering if their projects will ever happen. A transmission line takes a decade or more to go from idea to energized. That’s two or three administrations. Policy that flips every four years is policy no one can build against. 

The core bargain in BAAJA is roughly this: shorter windows to bring lawsuits under environmental statutes, in exchange for fixing many of the fundamental flaws in how we plan, site, and pay for transmission. And the certainty provisions cut both ways. Wind, solar, storage, gas, nuclear, transmission, and pipelines all get protection from having lawful permits yanked for political reasons. Whoever is in charge next can’t kneecap the other side’s projects. 

Some people read that symmetry as a weakness. I think it’s the whole design. Compromise isn’t the price we’re paying for this bill. It’s what makes it last.

The Gordian Knot 

The laws BAAJA touches have protected water, lands, and endangered species for decades, and most Americans hold that work dear. But the same laws and tactics used to delay polluting projects are being used just as effectively against the clean energy that’s key to preserving those same places. That’s the knot: any new infrastructure disturbs nature, and nature as we know it can’t survive without clean energy. A clean energy economy requires a lot of new infrastructure. 

The way through isn’t to stop building. It’s to build carefully, as groups like Audubon and The Nature Conservancy have been showing for years. BAAJA isn’t just a badly needed fix for our struggling grid. It’s proof that when people of goodwill work together, we can still do great things.

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