Transmission line begins construction in Arizona sun belt

Construction has begun on the 3.2 GW, 500 kV, 125-mile, $389 million Ten West Link transmission line from Arizona to California. The groundbreaking ceremony was attended by Vice-President Harris, Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. The Vice-President observed that the 500,000-mile US grid “is in desperate need of an upgrade.” Which is all the more true as the IRA subsidies are set to push mass solar and wind development. Compared to the 1,000 GW of wind and solar, and 420 GW of storage in the national pipeline, a $400 million transmission line is a small thing indeed for the Vice-President to be inaugurating, and the tone of that sentence was appropriate. In the first 11…