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- By Chez Oxendine
- Energy | Environment
The U.S. Department of Energy has halted a proposed transmission corridor that tribal leaders hoped would unlock grid investment needed to develop and export power from reservations across the northern Plains.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced the decision Aug. 12, ending the Biden-era designation process for the proposed Tribal Energy Access Corridor and two other corridors. The tribal corridor would have covered parts of North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska, including the Cheyenne River, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Standing Rock and Yankton reservations.
DOE said the corridors would not improve reliability or lower electricity costs and characterized the prior administration’s transmission policy as part of its “Green New Scam agenda.”
Wright said the decision followed a review of public and stakeholder feedback and argued that transmission policy should prioritize affordability and grid reliability rather than climate policy.
The corridor was one of three potential National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors advanced to the next stage of federal review in December 2024. A NIETC designation can unlock federal financing and, under certain conditions, allow the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to exercise siting authority when states deny or delay permits.
DOE’s decision ends the potential benefits for the proposed tribal corridor but does not cancel any transmission projects.
But tribal leaders in the northern Plains say the lack of transmission capacity is precisely what has kept major energy projects from moving forward. The Oceti Sakowin Power Authority — a power authority owned and operated by seven Sioux tribes — had spent more than two years working with Basin Electric, the Western Area Power Administration and congressional offices to secure the designation as a way to break that bottleneck.
“We worked very hard to get that designation, because right now, tribes have some of the best renewable energy resources in the country, and we’d like to develop it,” said Lyle Jack, economic development director for the Oglala Sioux Tribe and board chairman of OSPA. “But unfortunately, we can’t because we don’t have transmission capacity.”
Jack said high-capacity transmission lines largely skirt reservations across the northern Plains, leaving tribes without the infrastructure needed to export power. He described the Pine Ridge Reservation as a “transmission desert,” with only one 150-kilovolt line and insufficient capacity to export power.
Jack said OSPA has developed a Pine Ridge wind project that is ready for transmission, but Southwest Power Pool determined the tribes would need to fund a $250 million transmission upgrade — about one-third of the project’s total cost.
“That just made our project economically unviable,” Jack said. “We can’t find investors who are going to put money in and not see a return on it.”
OSPA leaders say a NIETC designation would have helped unlock federal financing tools for transmission development, potentially giving tribes a way to fund early development work and attract private capital. In a statement following the cancellation, OSPA said the designation would have made tribal transmission projects eligible for federal funding programs it couldn’t access otherwise, providing seed money that could help attract investment.
“It would have given us pre‑development money to map it all, find existing rights‑of‑way, meet with landowners, compensate them,” Jack told Tribal Business News. “With that in our pocket, we could have gone to private investors.”
In the statement, OSPA said its seven member tribes are seeking to develop more than 2 GW of wind, solar and geothermal generation, but cannot do so without additional transmission capacity to carry the power to customers.
DOE also canceled the Lake Erie–Canada Corridor and the Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor, which had also advanced to the same stage of DOE’s designation process in December 2024.
Jack said tribal leaders will continue advocacy efforts and hope for a change in congressional control after the midterm elections could create another path to federal funding.
“We’re not going to give up,” he said. “We’ve been in it too long.”
Brian Edwards contributed reporting.
