Stupid Utility Rules: 612 Year Wait for New Minnesota Wind Projects

Tell me how much sense this makes: due to some major old school bureaucratic clusterfuckery there is now a 612 year waiting list to build renewable energy projects in Minnesota. That’s right, if you want to put up a nice clean wind farm up in Garrison Keillor’s home state you have until 2620 to get everything together. What’s the holdup?

The Midwest Independent Transmission System (MISA) is the group in charge of the power lines and decides which power generation project gets to connect to them. Their regulations say they have to take two years to review each application and that they can’t look at more than one app at a time.

Those rules worked back in the day when the only thing going up was big ass coal plants but it got bogged down quite a bit with a flood of new wind farms wanting on the grid. Even with smaller operators bending the law a bit by clumping their projects together in one application there’s at least a fifty year wait. How dumb is that? Dumb enough to expect it’ll get fixed soon, but still… wtf.

Link [Solve Climate] via EcoGeek