PNNL

Background

Across the United States, there have been partnerships between landowners, surrounding communities, and transmission developers and operators enhance the space surrounding transmission lines, often called powerline corridors. These enhancements to powerline corridors can provide public benefits by providing ecosystem services, promoting recreation, and contributing to community prosperity.

As the nation acts to meet the pace of transmission development needed to maintain a reliable and cost-effective electric grid, there is an opportunity to design powerline corridors with an eye toward strong community benefits and environmental stewardship.

Project Overview

The Connecting Community Benefits with Transmission Corridors (ConCord) Initiative is a Grid Deployment Office initiative led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to investigate the full range of public benefits that can be enabled through corridor investments. Through innovative approaches and collaborative partnerships, the initiative will identify successful models and provide technical tools and resources for evaluating benefits in existing as well as future transmission infrastructure.

The ConCord Initiative aims to:

• Increase public recognition of potential benefits of electric transmission infrastructure.
• Enable a broad platform and network that shares credible and useful information about public, community, and environmental benefits from physical transmission infrastructure and the surrounding corridors.
• Expand and extend potential powerline corridor benefits into current and future transmission development.

Powerline Corridor Benefits

Recreation, ecosystem services, and community wealth-building are three types of public benefits that can be planned in powerline corridors to supplement the reliability, energy, and carbon benefits of the lines themselves. Planning projects that include benefits targeted specifically toward the communities and environment affected by the line—as opposed to the electricity consumers at the end of the line—reflects a modern development model that ensures a broader set of locally available benefits.

	Recreation Access to recreational opportunities is one of the most well-established benefits provided by transmission infrastructure. Public use of rights-of-way for recreating on linear trails and paths (often referred to as “transmission trails”), as well as open outdoor spaces like parks and athletic fields, draw broadly across communities.
	Ecosystem Services Planning transmission corridors that consider the natural features of an area can help improve local environmental conditions. This includes enhancing habitats for endangered and threatened species, using integrated vegetation management practices, creating pollinator habitats, and employing new technologies to better understand ecological conditions in these areas.
	Community Wealth Building There are approaches to transmission development and the design of community benefits plans that can provide communities with new economic development opportunities through a variety of structures, including jobs, land rents and utilization fees, and investment opportunities such as direct profit sharing over the lifespan of the infrastructure.

This initiative will outline options and identify best practices for providing these three categories of public benefits. It will also explore how transmission developers and operators – as well as others such as state and local governments, and transmission planners – can help to ensure these and other public benefits accompany transmission infrastructure whenever possible to maximize the benefits of limited land resources, increase community acceptance of infrastructure, and provide much-needed benefits to often underserved communities.

Contact Us

For more information on the ConCord Initiative, please contact:

Rebecca O’Neil, Principal Investigator  
Rebecca.ONeil@pnnl.gov | (971) 940-7098

Irena Netik, Project Manager  
Irena.Netik@pnnl.gov | (509) 375-7098