The Joshua Falls to Yeat Monstrosity Might Just be an Expensive Bureaucratic Double-booking

West Virginias's Public Service Commission (PSC) staff is asking the commission to pause or kill NextEra’s MidAtlantic Resiliency Link (MARL) transmission project, ostensibly over some last-minute route tweaks that suddenly created “new affected landowners” and a nearly million-dollar cost bump. The straightforward part of the filing is the usual procedural hand-wringing about notice and due process. Cute.

Buried deeper, in the section that actually matters (section III.C), the staff lawyers deliver the real punchline: the need for MARL itself is now “further in question” because shiny new information has “come to light” about other transmission projects. Translation: FERC pointed out that PJM, the grid overlord everyone pretends has its act together, has no clear, consistent rules to stop people from filing duplicate requests for the exact same transmission service. And one of the shortlisted alternatives that was supposedly weighed against MARL was none other than the Joshua Falls–Yeat 765 kV line (the Southern Corridor, a.k.a. the Valley Link proposal).

That project, along with others, is now being actively pursued at the same time MARL is still pending. Staff even sent discovery on it and is still chewing through the answers. So here we are: two (or more) massive high-voltage lines being treated as if they exist in parallel universes, all because the regional transmission organization never bothered to install a basic “hey, this request already exists” filter.

Seven months into the grinding war against Valley Link in central Virginia, it is almost too perfect. Thousands of people, landscapes, and communities are being put through the wringer so that data centers can keep humming, and the entire mess might trace back to the grid planners’ inability to keep their own request list from turning into a chaotic free-for-all.

Staff’s polite request for a 60-day tolling (or outright dismissal for incompleteness) is the bureaucratic equivalent of clearing one’s throat and saying, “Perhaps we should check whether we’re building two of the same thing before we finish paving over the mountains.” The route revisions are the shiny distraction; the possible duplicate transmission requests are the part that makes the whole exercise look like an expensive farce written by people who never had to live under the lines.

Read it for yourself folks, full link to the PDF below.

motion-on-transmission-line.pdf

Download PDF • 13.16MB

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