“People hear, oh my gosh, there are these new large loads coming on, and they're taking jet engines out of scrapyards and hooking them up and calling them gas plants. That's a little cyberpunk and sci-fi, but mostly they're doing it because they have no other choice. That is a really expensive way to procure electricity. The reason you would do that is you can't get hooked to the grid, and the reason you can't get hooked to the grid is the grid is not adequate.”
Heatmap News · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Context
The host asked whether the permitting bill's transmission provisions are good on their own or a down payment on future policy. Wyckoff says more transmission also takes pressure off data centers and other big new loads that are improvising their own power, tying the permitting fight to AI data center power demand.
Transcript
…a power of three or four, depending on how you're looking at it. So, a solar array that's twice as big is twice as good. But a wind array that has twice the wind resource or twice the size of the wind tower is multiples better. So, it doesn't scale the same way. It's not how people think about it.
…is better. You have more transmission, more electrons moving around. That means there's more arbitrage opportunities and wind solar wind. Or do you see it as almost a down payment for a future policy that is more deliberate about where transmission might go and who might benefit from it?
I think it's both. In Minnesota, we are a state that gets a large fraction of its energy from wind, but we're already transmission limited. We're already getting curtailment. And this will unleash already built clean. But it also, like I said, if we're already curtailing and we need to build out a lot more, we're going to need a lot more transmission. So, this becomes important. I think one of the things to keep in mind is people hear, like, oh my gosh, there's these new large loads coming on, and they're like taking jet engines out of scrapyards and they're hooking them up and calling them gas plants. I mean, that's a little like cyberpunk and sci-fi, but I think mostly they're doing it because they have no other choice. That is a really expensive way to procure electricity. Nobody really wants to do that. The reason you would do that is you can't get hooked to the grid. And the reason you can't get cooked to the grid is the grid is not adequate. So, by building out the grid, we will disincentivize folks from doing that sort of crazy stuff. And we will be hooking into a system that we know how to make clean and is getting clean. And in a fair world where there aren't fingers on the scale, wind and solar is what you're going to build, and then…
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It's a really fair question. And it's the second question that we're getting in all of the interest in this, including from many of our friends. And there are a bunch of reasons. And I take my closest advice from Pete Wyckoff was in the Senate for seven years and has a pretty good understanding of…
One Doesn’t. Senator Heinrich made when I talked to him yesterday that I had also just kind of written a similar piece along these lines. So of course I was thrilled to have a senator piece. Was that if the midterms raised your odds of a Democrat winning the White House in 2029, then suddenly the…
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