ATTENTION DOGE: Department of Energy’s Land Grab in New Mexico and Colorado for “Green Energy” Must be Stopped

New Mexico and Colorado are poised to be the targets of a massive federal land grab project – one that could become the largest in the history of the United States. The project is called the National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors (NIETCs) and has been in development by Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) since 2021 following the passage of the “Bi-partisan Infrastructure Act.” The NIETCs are exactly the kind of waste and abuse which is currently being rooted out and canceled by the Trump administration as they work to undo the plans of the radical left to replace reliable sources of energy for unworkable, and environmentally disastrous “green energy.”

The NIETCs started out as ten proposed geographic routes where the federal government could fast-track permitting for high-capacity electrical transmission projects, override the state’s permitting authority, and give private, for-profit developers the right to use eminent domain to take private land. The project has a $2.5 billion budget. The New Mexico Renewable Energy Transmission Authority, a state agency working to support the DOE in transferring New Mexicans’ private land to transmission developers, expects profit margins in these public-private partnerships to be between 9 and 38 percent – significantly higher than is typically achieved in the private sector.

The figure below depicts an early version of the NIETCs as they were planned across the country:

The figure looks like a half-drunk intern took a yellow highlighter to a map of the United States with no understanding of map scale or population centers. Some of the corridors measure 125 miles in width, though transmission lines require only a few hundred feet. New Mexico would be one of the hardest hit states – with almost 25 percent of its total area potentially up for grabs by transmission line developers, covering entire towns in the process.

This obscene proposal was roundly criticized for the DOE’s failure to prove that any of these lines are needed, the excessive area being contemplated for disruption, the assault on private property rights, and federal overreach. Several red states, including Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Missouri, initiated political pushback at the local and state level, after which the DOE revised the area where it planned to waste taxpayer dollars to the states with less political clout and more captured state governments.

The figure below is the pared-down proposed land grab:

Instead of ten corridors, the DOE will content itself with three – the inclusively named “Tribal Energy Access Corridor” (former called the “Northen Plains Corridor”), the “Lake Erie-Canada Corridor,” and the “Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor” – which would target New Mexico and Colorado.

The DOE chose the corridors to target private and state land, rather than federal land which is already under their control. The New Mexico Renewable Energy Transmission Authority calls this the “least regrets” approach because there are fewer environmental review requirements on state and private land. It is ironic that the DOE is so eager to avoid environmental regulations considering the entire project supposedly exists to save the environment.

The agency claims the lines are needed because “consumers are harmed by a lack of transmission in the area and that the development of new transmission would advance important national interests in that area, such as increased reliability, fewer power outages, and reduced consumer costs.” They can even use imaginary “expected need” as justification for overlaying a zone on private land for the heaviest, open ended industrial uses. The reality is that consumers who live in the Southwestern NIETC already have affordable and reliable electricity, and there are no renewable energy projects in place that would justify developing the contemplated transmission infrastructure.

The entire NIETC project is a head scratcher when one considers that the overall usage of electricity in the United States has been stable for the last 20 years, despite population growth:

Americans enjoy one of the most stable electrical grids in the world. So how does a functioning electrical grid become unstable when usage is not significantly increasing? Only by the self-sabotage of the Obama and Biden administrations’ militant use of environmental regulations to take steady coal and natural gas fired power plants offline and replace them with intermittent wind and solar power. The managed decline of the electrical grid ramped up when the United Nations passed the Paris Accords in 2015 to force countries to reduce their carbon production through “economic and social transformation.”

President Trump withdrew the United States from this disastrous agreement during his first term, but Biden put us right back in it during his four years with a goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The United States left the Paris Accords agreement again per President Trump’s executive order signed last month, but the damage of this plan still needs to be rooted out and undone.

Sadly, New Mexico’s feckless state and national leadership makes it an easy target for “green energy” pipe dreams cooked up by ideologically possessed federal employees working from home for the vestiges of Biden’s DOE. There has been no discernable push-back from the governor’s office. Indeed, several New Mexico Democrat legislators have not been shy about their dream of shutting down oil and gas completely – which would be the end of a steady electrical grid no matter how many boondoggle transmission lines were built.

In July 2024, 25 New Mexico Republican legislators sent a letter to the New Mexico delegation in Washington, calling the NIETC a “direct attack on long-held rights of New Mexico’s farmers and ranchers” and “an infringement on the sovereignty of the state of New Mexico” and asked them to “take every action possible to halt the federal land grab”. The letter received no response.

Ed and Patty Hughs, ranchers whose property lies in the path of the “Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor,” have been studying this project for several months, traveling to affected counties, alerting landowners and county officials of the DOE’s plans, and asking them to get active in helping them oppose it in New Mexico and Colorado. The Hughs’s said no local officials had previously even heard of the NIETC or that huge amounts of land in their counties were being eyed by the DOE for potential confiscation.

Mr. Hughs told us, “Our ranch has been in our family over 100 years. It is inconceivable that the federal government would be contemplating giving it to private corporations through eminent domain to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”

Mr. Hughs also touched on the economic devastation that a corridor through New Mexico would cause:

The Southwestern corridor includes some of the best rangeland in the country. Turning it over to the development of industrial transmission lines, infrastructure, battery storage and “other solutions” mysteriously included in possible uses within the corridor would make the land unusable for anything else. It would be a short-term gain to out-of-state private corporations, but it would wipe out the historical use of that land and the families who live there. In fact, as long as this project is in contemplation there is no economic stability for the affected landowners. How can ranchers or farmers be expected to continue to spend their hard-earned resources on conserving or expanding their operations when it can be taken from them at the stroke of a pen?

According to the Hughs’s estimates, 2,000,000 acres of New Mexico, especially agriculture land, would be up for grabs to private companies through the DOE. The counties affected by this land grab annually produce $1.9 billion in agricultural products and contain over $10 billion in agricultural land and buildings. Limited water resources would also likely go to the developers since large amounts of water are needed to build and maintain these corridors.

In contrast, the NIETCs can unlock $2.5 billion in federal funding for all three potential NIETCs. Even if half of this, or $1.25 billion, were spent in New Mexico, that investment in private for-profit developers pales in contrast to the earning potential of what has been one of New Mexico’s most important and most sustainable industries – agriculture.

In contrast, the NIETCs can unlock $2.5 billion in federal funding for all three potential NIETCs. Even if half of this, or $1.25 billion, were spent in New Mexico, that investment in private for-profit developers pales in contrast to the earning potential of what has been one of New Mexico’s most important and most sustainable industries – agriculture.
The DOE has provided no financial analysis to estimate the “cost savings” to consumers on the electricity prices they claim will be lowered by the project. But with the numbers we have to work with right now, New Mexico is looking at sustaining a capital loss of $10 billion dollars, and indefinite annual losses of $1.9 billion dollars per year, for a $1.25 billion-dollar short-term investment from the DOE. Not only would the financial losses be devastating, but who will the transmission line serve when all the landowners are edged off their property?

We asked Mr. Hughs what kind of support he is getting from local officials and other landowners for their cause. He said the response has been overwhelmingly supportive of their efforts, “Almost every local official and landowner we have talked to think the DOE’s plan is insane and are interested in doing what they can to help us stop it.” The Hughs’s have set up a Facebook page where people who want to get involved can go to get more information and join the opposition efforts.

This is not the DOE’s first attempt at siting “National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors” – previous efforts failed in the courts who determine that the DOE did not meet the criteria for establishing such corridors. However, under the Biden administration, Congress changed the law that the courts relied on in their previous decision. It is a travesty that private landowners in the United States have been continually targeted by their own government who want to hand over their land to private developers, displacing the citizens who live and work there, eliminating livelihoods and the economies they have built.