Takeaways
- The Northwest needs more electric transmission capacity to deliver clean, reliable power from where it’s produced to the homes and businesses that use it.
- But the projects to build these new transmission lines, or even just upgrade existing ones, are beset by permitting delays, which drive up project costs and, ultimately, customers’ monthly utility bills.
- Permitting delays drive higher utility bills by increasing the cost of financing projects, bloating legal and contractual fees, and exposing projects to inflation. Plus, with each day of delay, electricity customers forgo cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable electricity.
- A faster, more predictable permitting process, wouldn’t just save us on our bills; it would cut the pollution, precarity, and backwardness of staying hooked on fossil fuels.
Find audio versions of Sightline articles on any of your favorite podcast platforms, including Spotify, YouTube, and Apple.
Delays, delays, delays. It takes forever to build the transmission lines that carry power from where it’s produced to where people use it.
Idaho Power and PacifiCorp can tell you. The two utilities thought they’d be starting construction back in 2018 on the Boardman to Hemingway (B2H) transmission line, which spans 290 miles of Idaho and Oregon. The project broke ground this summer, 19 years after the utilities initially proposed the project.
Puget Sound Energy (PSE) can tell you. It flipped the switch on its 16-mile Energize Eastside transmission line upgrade project in 2024, a full six years after the utility needed the line in service to meet customer demand and ten years after the project’s launch.
State and local permitting alone ate up eight and nine years of each project’s respective schedule, from environmental reviews to land use approvals. (B2H also required federal permits, extending the total permitting timeline for that project to more than 15 years.) Even now, three years after Oregon first granted Idaho Power approval to begin construction—a decision now twice upheld by the Oregon Supreme Court—Umatilla County still has not granted the utility all the permits it needs to break ground within its jurisdiction.
These holdups don’t come cheap. Permitting delays pushed Energize Eastside’s project costs up by $52.4 million, increasing the total project budget by 11.5 percent. B2H’s cost estimates ballooned by at least $300 million (from $1.0–1.2 billion in a 2018 estimate to $1.5–1.7 billion), at least in part because of permitting delays.
And it’s not utilities that suffer when projects stall; it’s consumers: through higher electricity bills and dirtier, less reliable power.
Delayed project approval undermines clean, affordable energy
Transmission permitting delays beget higher project costs, and, later on, higher electricity bills in four main ways:
1. Higher financing costs and fatter utility profits
When utilities want to build a transmission project, they must find a way to pay for it. Most utilities raise these funds by borrowing from lenders and by attracting investors who buy shares in the company, each expecting a return on their investment. Utilities add these financing charges to the project’s construction costs and eventually, with regulatory approval, to customers’ monthly bills.1
To make matters worse for ratepayers, federal utility accounting rules treat financing costs as a capital expense, which means that, in the peculiar universe of utility regulation, utilities get to profit from them. As a result, electricity customers end up paying twice: first through the interest accrued during construction and again when utilities earn a return on that same interest once the project enters the rate base. Put another way, utilities make money on project delays.
In fact, utilities profit from any permitting-related cost increase, not only financing charges.
Let’s take an example. The above-mentioned Energize Eastside project by PSE, which upgraded 16 miles of transmission lines stretching between Seattle-area suburbs Renton and Bellevue, will keep power flowing reliably to several growing communities. Permitting delays increased the project’s financing costs by $5 million, Sightline estimates, bringing the total permitting-related delay costs to $52.4 million.
But Bellevue, Redmond, Renton, and Newcastle’s slow approvals of Energize Eastside won’t only cost ratepayers $52.4 million. Over 60 years (the approximate average lifespan of a transmission line), due to utilities’ regulated rate of return, ratepayers will pay back around $167 million.2
In other words, for every $1 million in costs added to rate base, customers will pay PSE about $3.2 million.
2. Lawyers and consultants galore
Ten years ago, Idaho Power estimated it would be able to energize the B2H line in 2021, enabling the Pacific Northwest and the Intermountain West to better share power, especially during the Northwest’s winter peak and the Intermountain West’s summer peak. Two years later, it revised that estimate to 2024, citing “ongoing permitting requirements.” In its most recent quarterly update to Oregon regulators, Idaho Power projected the line will be in service no sooner than 2027.
While B2H wasn’t getting built, lawyers were getting paid. Idaho Power and PacifiCorp have been enmeshed in lawsuits that have dragged out the project schedule, challenging: federal rights-of-way, environmental reviews, a state-granted site certificate for construction, landowner requests, eminent domain, and its state-granted certificate for public convenience and necessity. Neither Idaho Power nor PacifiCorp has yet disclosed the cost for these legal battles, but ratepayers will likely foot at least some of the bill.
In one of the more egregious examples of permitting delays from the Energize Eastside project, the City of Newcastle held up a conditional use permit for a 1.5-mile section of the line for five years and then slow-rolled the subsequent construction permit for an additional year. Newcastle’s lengthy process, and decision to hire a consultant, increased the company’s permitting fees to $500,000, a 14-fold increase from what Newcastle had originally estimated it would charge PSE. PSE’s electric customers are now paying that extra half-million dollars—with interest.
Sluggish permitting also dragged out the Energize Eastside construction schedule, piling on costs. In 2021 PSE’s contractor sent in a change order for $6.2 million, stating, “The transmission line construction has taken two years longer than originally planned due to permit delays from various jurisdictions. As a result, additional funds are required to cover Contractor project management time, land liaison time, and monthly charges for construction yards.” These extra costs were heaped on the mounting project bill.
3. Money can’t buy what it used to
When PSE, Idaho Power, and PacifiCorp first proposed their projects, they expected to wrap construction before 2020. Yet permitting delays exposed both projects to the post-COVID inflation wave, driving material and labor costs well past what planners had budgeted.
In regulatory filings, PSE revealed details about inflationary impacts on the Energize Eastside project. In an email correspondence between PSE and its contractor, Wilson Construction, a Wilson executive noted, “IBEW wages have increased nearly 16 percent since the project bid,” attributing the increase to delays pushing project work out from 2021–22 to 2023–24. He continued, “Construction equipment costs have increased by roughly 24 percent since the beginning of 2021” and “the cost of concrete has increased at a minimum of 28 percent since 2021.”
Idaho Power is also warning that new US federal tariffs could take a toll on the B2H project budget. Indeed, President Trump’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, key components of transmission towers and lines, stand at 50 percent as of November 2025. Had the project started in 2018, those same tariffs peaked at 25 percent but may have been zero if the metals were imported from a tariff-exempt country.
Financing, overhead, and inflation costs all end up in the same place: on customers’ bills. In most cases, regulators treat delay-related expenses as legitimate, letting utilities fold them into the rates they charge customers rather than absorb them as losses.
Washington’s regulators determined that PSE had prudently incurred its delay-driven costs for Energize Eastside and could add them to customers’ rates. As for B2H, once Idaho Power and PacifiCorp complete it, regulators in Idaho and Oregon will examine the project’s inflated price tag to determine its prudency. And because PacifiCorp has now disclosed that the line will primarily serve a single industrial customer in Oregon, regulators will need to determine how much of the project’s costs—including delay-related expenses—if any, will should fall on residential ratepayers.
“Financing, overhead, and inflation costs all end up in the same place: on customers’ bills.”
4. Forgone clean, cheap power
The longer it takes decision makers to give the greenlight to transmission projects, the longer customers are stuck paying for dirty, pricey power sources, namely coal and gas. Limited transmission capacity pushes grid operators to use inefficient generation or curtail renewables, raising congestion costs and weakening reliability.
Electricity costs in Canada and the United States could rise by an average of 3 percent if currently planned transmission projects are delayed past 2032, according to a recent analysis from nonprofit think tank Resources for the Future.3 Cost increases from delays would be even higher in much of Cascadia: 31.7 percent in British Columbia, 19.3 percent in Oregon, and 6.9 percent in Washington.4 The study found that the cost savings created by more grid capacity more than offset the high capital costs of transmission projects. In other words, waiting is more expensive than building.
The team at Resources for the Future also found that transmission and generation delays lead to more pollution, again due to utilities relying more on coal and gas for power while waiting for new, cleaner sources to connect to the grid. Transmission delays increased US and Canadian power sector emissions of greenhouse gases by 9 percent, sulfur dioxide by 7 percent, nitrogen oxides by 10 percent, and particulate matter (less than 2.5 micrometers) by 9 percent.
Further, poorer households pay more in both economic and health costs for delayed grid buildout than richer ones. The lowest-income quintile in the United States and Canada would pay $52 per capita in net costs while the highest-income quintile reaps $80 per capita in net benefits from transmission delays. One reason for the disparity is that low-income households are less likely than high-income households to be shareholders of energy companies—and thus to see the investor profits that accrue from the delays.
Similarly, Black and Hispanic households bear greater costs than white households, in part due to greater health impacts from the increase in airborne particulate matters that results from transmission delay.
And sometimes, delays push utilities into funding stop-gap grid fixes that they would not have pursued otherwise—exactly because these stop-gaps are costlier and deliver only a fraction of what the original project was designed to provide.
The B2H delay, for instance, has already driven Idaho Power to pursue expensive interim solutions. In its 2021 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), utilities’ regular planning document, while the B2H permitting process dragged on, Idaho Power identified the need for temporary transmission upgrades, such as portions of the Gateway West project and local integration work, totaling $227.6 million. Two years later, again because of B2H delays, Idaho Power announced in its 2023 IRP an $880 million coal-to-gas-fired turbine conversion on its Valmy generators to meet near-term needs.5
Ratepayers could have been spared these costs had B2H permitting moved faster.
When permitting drags, Cascadians pay
Each year that transmission projects sit in limbo waiting for permits, ratepayers risk absorbing rising construction and financing costs; communities breathe dirtier air; and the region forfeits the benefits of cleaner and cheaper electricity. These lost opportunities ripple outward, constraining the region’s ability to power new industries and meet its climate goals.
Faster and more predictable permitting is an affordability solution that unlocks the clean energy future and all its associated benefits.
Related: Is the Permitting Process for Transmission Lines Really Broken? | Analyzing three common claims of malfunction, plus proposing a new, faster way forward for the Northwest.
