“There's a line that was proposed in 2010 that just went online two years ago, to take clean electricity from Minnesota and Iowa and get it to Chicago and Milwaukee, where those people live but don't have any good wind near them. It got held up for 14 years, basically, with crossing the Mississippi River. That was a federal permit it just couldn't get. We can't wait 14, 16, 18 years for these lines to get built.”
Heatmap News · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Context
The host asked how federal permitting played out while the Inflation Reduction Act was being rolled out. Wyckoff, who ran Minnesota's energy division, gives a concrete case of a transmission line stalled for more than a decade.
Transcript
…get started now. Trump cannot stop all the paperwork that will be needed to start all these transmission lines. He can't get in the way of all of it. I just don't believe even he will be able to do that. And in two years, we'll have a hopefully a dem trifecta and we build on it a lot. So, yeah.
…in the story of this bill has been the degree to which folks in the Biden administration or in that trifecta saw the permitting apparatus up close and changed their minds. Can you talk about what role federal permitting played in the implementation of the IRA as you experienced it and you saw it?
Yeah, just to back up and to reinforce the point Lena made first is with the IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law, we passed a lot of climate policy. We passed the stuff that Democrats mostly agreed on. And then we tried to do permitting. I think the order was wrong, but I wouldn't wish a new trifecta or even a new Congress next year the battle as the first thing out of the gate within the party. Like, let's get this done so then we can do the things that we agree on. This is a fundamentally optimistic bill. It's saying when I look to the future, I don't see Trump's all the way down. I don't see like Trump to vanced or whatever. I see that we will be able to do good clean energy policy and that this is Obi-Wan Kenobi releasing the tractor beam so that the team can just go do good stuff and save the universe. But to answer your actual question, Rob, so I got back to Minnesota. I was supposed to be point on implementing IRA, but also we had an unexpected trifecta, which is what drew me back to Minnesota after the 22 election locally in Minnesota. And we passed a whole bunch of stuff, which I called Minnesota's mini IRA. And we passed a 100% clean electricity standard by 2040. And then we…
Biggest wind farm in the country, this year.
It's being transmitted west of New Mexico. And you can talk more about this, Lena, by a line that is brand new, but is not brand new. And when it was proposed, it was a long time held up by interstate permitting friction. We can't wait 14, 16, 18 years for these lines to get built.
If I remember correctly, the power line that was trying to cross the Mississippi was held up specifically by a single district court judge who just kept tossing. It back on one NEPA ground after another and managed to extract years of delays from this project. And one of the reforms in this bill is…
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