Adding capacity to the electricity grid is not a simple task

Re:Adding capacity to the electricity grid is not a simple task by donkeyd on Thursday April 06, 2023 @08:29AM (#35467450)

Correct. It's also not just about the money, it also takes a lot of time and adds a large amount of uncertainty to a project. Not every owner is willing to comply, causing an entire route to have to be reconsidered, which takes a lot of time. Eminent domain is pretty much never used, because judges (in my country) will pretty much always side with the property owner, unless the utility can proof that there's really no other way (which they almost never can).

So on a 10km+ route with hundreds of properties, multiple municipalities or other public organizations and other utilities, this gets really complicated really quickly.

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Re:Adding capacity to the electricity grid is not a simple task by cmmeur01 on Thursday April 06, 2023 @09:00AM (#35467764)

Eminent domain being “pretty much never used” is a bold face lie in the US.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2023/04/04/bullitt...

Here’s a story from this week where a gas company took land from a forest to build a pipeline that the previous and current landowners had no interest in selling to the gas company.

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Re:Adding capacity to the electricity grid is not a simple task by donkeyd on Thursday April 06, 2023 @09:12AM (#35467891)

I'm not in the US, hence me explicitly writing 'in my country', because I'm aware that more countries exist and that things aren't the same everywhere.

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Re:Adding capacity to the electricity grid is not a simple task by markdown on Thursday April 06, 2023 @09:21AM (#35467985)

That's so bizarre. In my country only the government can force you to sell them your land under eminent domain.

Insane that in the US, companies can use eminent domain as well.

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Re:Adding capacity to the electricity grid is not a simple task by 1123581321 on Thursday April 06, 2023 @09:34AM (#35468114)

Much of the activity stems from a disastrous Supreme Court ruling a couple decades ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

A lot of farmland and lovely homes have been unprotected since. Many Americans wish for this case to be revisited (if they know about the case.)

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Re:Adding capacity to the electricity grid is not a simple task by ghaff on Thursday April 06, 2023 @09:54AM (#35468325)

While Kelo was IMO a bad decision, it's also not the case that eminent domain is routinely exercised at low cost and effort in the US. Private property owners routinely block many types of development on their land and adjoining land. People like to decry NIMBYism all the time. I suspect building an interstate highway system in the US today would be effectively impossible.

ADDED: And, in general, exercising eminent domain should be hard. One can simultaneously believe it should exist and have a lot of safeguards against exercising it.

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Re:Adding capacity to the electricity grid is not a simple task by eppp on Thursday April 06, 2023 @01:36PM (#35471689)

Eminent domain for a public road is one thing. Forcibly taking land for a private company to make profits on is entirely different and not comparable. That is the part I object to the most.

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Re:Adding capacity to the electricity grid is not a simple task by markdown on Thursday April 06, 2023 @06:32PM (#35475420)

> I suspect building an interstate highway system in the US today would be effectively impossible.

The government should be able to take whatever land it needs for a highway, railway, etc. When we're talking about public infrastructure, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one landowner.

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