A transmission line outlives the project it was built for

Serguey Asael Shinder22 September 2026, 09:402 min read

Two decisions this week sat oddly next to each other. New York approved a $3.26 billion, 90-mile transmission line to carry offshore wind — days after opponents argued that cancelled offshore wind projects had made it unnecessary. The regulator built the line anyway, and its reason is worth generalising: the state's renewable target is set in statute, and the target, not the current project pipeline, defines the need.

That is the right way to think about wires, and it is counter-intuitive, so it is worth stating plainly.

Generation projects fail; the need they serve does not. Any single wind or solar project can be cancelled, delayed, or repriced out of existence. The demand for clean power that the state has committed to does not move when one project dies. A transmission line is sized for the second thing, not the first — which means it will routinely look premature next to the projects that exist today.

Wires and generation run on different clocks, and that is the source of the apparent mismatch. A transmission line takes the better part of a decade to plan, permit and build, and then lasts forty years. A solar farm can be built in eighteen months. If you wait to build the wire until the generation is certain, the wire arrives a decade late and the generation sits curtailed. Building ahead of the pipeline is not optimism; it is matching the lead times.

The failure mode is real, and it is the opposite one. Build too much transmission against a target that is then abandoned, and ratepayers own a line to nowhere for forty years. That is why the statute matters so much in New York's reasoning: the legal target is the thing that makes building-ahead prudent rather than reckless. Weaken the target and the same line becomes a stranded asset.

So the question to ask of any transmission approval is not "does the generation exist yet" — it usually does not, and should not have to. It is "how firm is the commitment the line is being built against". In New York the emissions targets were loosened this year and the offshore-wind goal was not; the Commission built to the part that held. Watch the commitment, not the pipeline. The line will outlive every project on today's list, and it was approved on the assumption that the target will too.