Is It Even Needed? Better Alternatives Exist

California's grid operator has already made this exact call — against a line it had itself approved. In its board-approved 2025–2026 Transmission Plan, CAISO “cancel[ed] the Serrano-Del Amo-Mesa 500-kilovolt Transmission Reinforcement project in the LA Basin,” a 500 kV line it had greenlit three years earlier. The reliability need, it said, “will instead be addressed by a number of smaller, lower-cost upgrades and increased reliance on energy storage development planned in key areas.” A new 500 kV line, called off because cheaper options did the job. ^[1]

Upgrading what already exists is ordinary practice, not a fringe ask. That same CAISO plan carries twelve reconductoring projects — restringing existing lines to carry more power in the corridors they already occupy — three of them using advanced conductors. ^[1] Peer-reviewed research finds that reconductoring with advanced conductors “can cost-effectively double transmission capacity within existing right-of-way” on shorter segments, at under half the unit cost of building new. ^[2] The U.S. Department of Energy likewise counts reconductoring, to “increase transmission capacity,” among the standard tools utilities already use. ^[4]

None of that means a single 145-mile line can simply be re-strung — on long lines the limit is often stability rather than heat, and the honest question is narrower: SDG&E's project is justified as relief for a specific list of bottlenecks on existing lines, so each one deserves the question of whether a cheaper upgrade fixes it. By law the review has to weigh a real range of alternatives, including the “no project” option — which means a new corridor through this community has to be proven necessary, and it hasn't been. ^{[4] [2]}

By the grid operator's own 2022–2023 plan, this line is policy-driven — built to move renewable power, not to serve local demand — and no specific local-demand need has ever been stated for it. No one has shown this community needs the line at all. ^[3]

And a need asserted today is not a need that survives tomorrow. The grid operator approved the Serrano–Del Amo–Mesa 500 kV line in the Los Angeles Basin — then canceled it three years later, once smaller upgrades and energy storage could meet the same reliability need. A need finding is a snapshot, not a fact of nature, and this line's has never been retested against what's available now. ^[1]

There's a fair question underneath all this: if the goal is clean power, why generate it in the remote desert and run a 150-mile line to the coast, instead of generating it closer to where it's used? Part of the answer is geography and policy — California's 100%-clean-by-2045 law (SB 100) and the retirement of the San Onofre nuclear plant push the grid toward large desert solar and geothermal, which sit far from the cities that use the power. ^[5]

But part of the answer is money. A regulated utility earns its profit as a guaranteed return on the capital it builds and owns — so the more big infrastructure it builds, the more it makes. It earns essentially nothing when you put solar on your own roof. That structural tilt toward company-owned megaprojects is well known to economists. And state policy has pushed the same direction: in 2023 California cut the credit for rooftop-solar power by roughly 75–80%, and home-solar sales fell by more than half. ^{[6] [7]}

Yet local solar, batteries, and smarter demand — “non-wires alternatives” — can meet growing demand faster, cheaper, and with far less land than a giant new line. The environmental review is supposed to take that seriously. The question isn't whether California needs clean power; it's whether this particular line, in this place, is the right way to get it. → See Who profits, and why this line? ^[8]