James Adams Staff Picks - October 2021

I selected my artifacts for this month’s media brief from the curated set of articles of the South Eastern Energy News listserve and the US Energy News listserve, published by the Energy News Network. I keep up with these listserves to stay up to date on topics relevant to energy transition, to energy disasters, and to energy and environmental justice.

            The artifacts that I selected for this month served as an update to the articles that I chose for the July Media Brief, both of which focus on the infrastructural planning in response to the Texas power crisis and then on the larger federal context of just energy transition planning taken on by the Biden administration.

            The article on the slow progress of a Texas transmission line project addresses an often neglected aspect of renewable transition infrastructure: the wires. I selected this article because, whether renewable or fossil-fueled, power plants often take the center stage of energy politics. However, the transmission lines that carry power from these plants to our dense urban centers are just as important. The article points out that it took twelve years for this single Texas transmission project to get off the ground, while Biden’s climate protection plan will take a 60% increase in transmission infrastructure across the United States in just nine years. Thus, in a larger sense, this article serves as a warning of all the complex and costly developments that have to coincide with each other in order to achieve a just transition to renewable energy.

            On that note, I also included the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Framework as an important development in energy transition planning in the US. The plan marks an important step forward, noting historic commitments to renewable energy development and climate protection that also center frontline communities. However, much as I argued back in July, the framework also lacks sufficient specifications of how equity will be centered at the ground level. Thus, I selected this artifact because it is important to keep up with these developments both for the commitments they make (which we can hold our politicians to) and for the cracks and loopholes within those commitments that we need to be wary of.