The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has published a notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the proposed Plains & Eastern Clean Line Transmission Project, which would help integrate more renewable energy onto the electric grid.
The project would include an approximately 700-mile, overhead, high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) transmission line and associated facilities, and would have the capacity to deliver approximately 3.5 GW of power – primarily from renewable energy generation facilities in the Oklahoma Panhandle region – to load-serving entities in the mid-South and the Southeast via an interconnection with the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The proposed project would traverse Oklahoma and Arkansas and deliver power to western Tennessee.
Prior to making a determination of whether to participate in the proposed project, the DOE must fully evaluate it, in consultation with the Southwestern Power Administration, including reviewing the potential environmental impacts pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act.
Clean Line first identified several potential route corridors within a broad study area and subsequently refined the corridors using input from federal and state agencies, municipalities, nongovernmental organizations and thousands of stakeholders. Clean Line recently held 20 open-house meetings in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Tennessee to seek additional input on potential routes. Using this information, Clean Line identified and submitted to the DOE several potential routes.
The DOE will analyze the potential routes, along with a range of reasonable alternatives proposed in scoping comments, and may expand or refine the range of alternatives based on those comments. Maps identifying the potential routes currently proposed for analysis are available here.
