Oklahoma’s next House Speaker, Kyle Hilbert, says the state is no longer in the running for a massive federal energy transmission planning project. Landowners and lawmakers had been lashing out at the NIETC designation process.
A federal proposal aimed to designate a 645-mile-long “energy transmission corridor” across Oklahoma and incentivize companies to build transmission lines along it. After public opposition, that project is dead, according to the state’s incoming Speaker of the House.
Oklahoma House Speaker-elect Kyle Hilbert had just filed a legislative resolution Thursday opposing the corridor. And he said that pressure, along with a deluge of public opposition, worked.
Hilbert and other lawmakers addressed hundreds of Oklahomans gathered at the Creek County Fairgrounds Thursday night to oppose the federal transmission corridor.
“This afternoon I received a call from the United States Department of Energy,” Hilbert told the crowd. “The Delta Plains Corridor will not be a possible national corridor as of Monday.”
Hilbert’s resolution specifically pushed back on the National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor (NIETC) designation process. The federal program aims to identify areas in the U.S. that need more electrical transmission infrastructure over the next decade and eventually provide funding for companies that build transmission lines to fill that need.
One of the ten proposed corridors ran approximately 645 miles from the Oklahoma panhandle to Little Rock, Arkansas. According to the Department of Energy, the region will need more than 5 times as much transmission capacity as it currently has by 2035.
But since the list of preliminary transmission corridors was released, Oklahomans have been pushing back. Much of the concern is about the potential use of eminent domain within the corridor.
Several lawmakers and Attorney General Gentner Drummond had come out in opposition to the project.
"Everyone in Oklahoma should be concerned by this federal land grab attempt if the NIETC designation is granted," Rep. Brad Boles, R-Marlow, said in a statement.
The resolution sponsored by the lawmakers vowed “to take all legislative action available to prevent the establishment of an eighteen-mile wide federal energy corridor in Oklahoma.”
But according to an FAQ page for the NIETC process, the designation did not mean “any immediate transmission construction, use of eminent domain to acquire land, or impacts to existing land uses without further process.”
Before the meeting, Dylan Reed with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office said public feedback had been the goal at this point of the NIETC timeline. He said the idea is not to take an 18-mile-wide swath of land but to work with landowners within that area to identify space for an approximately 100-foot-wide transmission line.
“We intentionally made some of these proposed corridors wide because we don't know these areas as well as the people who live there,” Reed said. “People told us, ‘Hey, you can't do that here because of these local concerns.’ And that was very helpful to hear that.”
Hilbert said Reed called him to inform him the DOE was removing the corridor across Oklahoma from the preliminary list of NIETC options. An email to DOE officials Thursday night following the meeting was not immediately returned, but Hilbert said the announcement will come Monday
The NIETC areas were meant to incentivize companies to build transmission lines where the DOE thought they were needed. But those companies would still have needed to go through all the permitting processes and land acquisition negotiations required for a transmission project outside the corridor. For similar transmission projects, companies often access through an easement agreement.
Although the NIETC project will not incentivize transmission projects across Oklahoma, there’s nothing stopping private companies from pursuing them. Multiple companies are already in the process of building transmission lines through the would-be NIETC area: Invenergy’s Cimarron Link project and Transource’s Sooner-Wewika project.
The NIETC process arose under the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It’s unclear whether or how the program could change under the incoming Trump administration.
Hilbert is optimistic it won’t mean new transmission projects for Oklahoma.
“The best news for this is what happened the first week of November when President Trump went back to the White House,” he told the crowd, which responded with cheers.
This report was produced by the Oklahoma Public Media Exchange, a collaboration of public media organizations. Help support collaborative journalism by donating at the link at the top of this webpage.
