Making the energy connection: A review of the geographies of high-voltage transmission

Energy metabolisms and space

Arguing for a geographical understanding of energy transition, Bridge et al. (2013, 333) argue that energy systems are constituted spatially: the components of the system are embedded in particular settings and the networked nature of the system itself produces geographies of connection, dependency, and control. Transmission infrastructure is central to these “networks,” both in the literal sense and in the way they channel society's broader energy metabolisms to and from some places while avoiding others.

By energy metabolism, this article refers to how the flow of energy (broadly construed) mutually transforms nature, space, and society: how energy resources, profits, and externalities circulate (or fail to circulate) through socioecological systems, how spaces are transformed (or fail to be transformed) through these processes of circulation, and how these (failed or successful) transformations condition present and future possibilities (Cederlöf 2021; Clark and York 2005; Harrison and Popke 2018; Swyngedouw 1996). As Cederlöf (2021, 71) argues, “the distribution of various energy forms is not a politically neutral process, but one where political and economic actors attempt to organize energy flows through infrastructures to achieve social visions; to maintain or contest social relations; and to engage in contingent everyday practices of energy use.

Andrew Needham's (2014) Power Lines exemplifies this approach. Needham uses powerlines as a method to trace the creation of metropolitan Phoenix and the greater US Southwest via the siphoning of water, hydroelectricity, and coal from extractive hinterlands, particularly from the Hopi and Navajo (Diné) reservations. Long-distance transmission allows Phoenix to be developed as a “clean sky” manufacturing center by displacing the environmental and social externalities of hydroelectric development, coal mining, and coal-fired electricity generation to energy peripheries, tethering extractive hinterlands to consumptive centers by embedding these relations in the landscape. In effect, transmission decouples the appearance of sustainability for urban consumers from the experiences of socioecological degradation far outside the city: while pipelines are typically synonymous with fossil fuels, transmission (and electricity itself) is fuel-neutral. In Needham's telling, Phoenix and the modern Southwest emerge as regional entities held together by a network of powerlines and associated aqueducts, well pumps, canals, and coal slurries. If Phoenix is the metabolizing body, transmission lines are the metabolic pathways that circulate resources, profits, and externalities unevenly across the region. ¹

This metabolic approach to energy systems, returning to Cederlöf (2021, 74), insists that energy “is not an object but a spatiotemporal relation,” circulating in accordance not only with the laws of physics but also with the logics of profitability and market efficiency — and potentially in accordance with the prerogatives of energy democracy and just energy transitions. The transmission literature highlights three main effects of these “relations.” The first is the increasing centralization of power that accompanies the development of large-scale energy systems, with energy capital and state formations taking on major influence, which is dealt with in greater detail in the following sections.

The second effect is the bypassing of certain spaces and communities by the benefits of energy access, exemplified most viscerally by transmission infrastructure that passes overhead of households and communities that remain off-the-grid involuntarily, particularly in Global South contexts. While transmission is often promoted as a means of increasing energy access and affordability, transmission infrastructure itself is useless to households without a concomitant investment in distribution infrastructure.

For example, work by Jonathan Silver and collaborators on splintered urbanism has emphasized the uneven development of electricity systems in many Global South cities, with a focus on the failure of infrastructural buildout to deliver reliable and affordable electricity as a basic amenity (Salamanca and Silver 2022; Silver 2015, 2021). In this work, at issue is less the bulk transport of electricity to market and more the equitable and accessible distribution of electricity to end-users — in other words, more about distribution than transmission, though both reflect uneven investments in electricity infrastructure.

The third effect is the role that transmission plays in producing unevenness across space as energy is extracted, generated, circulated, and consumed. Writing about Hydro-Quebec, Desbiens (2013, 40) quotes Bill Namagoose, executive chief of the Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec, to describe the “two ends” of a hydroelectric line:

There's the luxury end, the comfortable end. Lights, heat, cooking, there's music coming out of the other end of the line. But at our end of the line, we don't hear music. We hear massive destruction. Dynamiting of our rivers, dynamiting our cliffs, dynamiting our land, blowing up our land. Huge, monstrous vehicles ravaging the land. That is what we hear at the other end of the line.

Transmission becomes emblematic of uneven exchange, as electricity simultaneously brings “luxury” to consuming communities and “destruction” to producing communities, many of whom remain unconnected to the grid in the case of the Cree. Jones (2014), focusing on the US Mid-Atlantic states, similarly argues that powerlines work as “dissociating technologies” that create “landscapes of intensification” in which increasing energy usage is encouraged by social and political policies that generate demand, but also by the cognitive and socioecological distancing enabled by transmission infrastructure.

This attention to the unevenness produced by these metabolic assemblages can ironically lead scholars to fix their attention to either the “end of the line” and not the connections in between. Transmission is more than just a metaphor for metabolism. While Needham (2014) provides a detailed account of the spatial, ecological, and sociopolitical politics of resource extraction and consumption, for example, he pays surprisingly little attention to the physical powerlines themselves.

This reflects, in part, how transmission is a technology that annihilates space, sending electricity near-instantaneously across vast distances in a way that ties peripheries to centers while also obscuring the socioecological transformations of ever-growing energy metabolisms. However, there is room for the literature on transmission — and energy geographies more broadly — to engage with work on logistics to complicate the smoothness of this circulation (Chua et al. 2018; Cowen 2014, 2020). In his discussion of a “logistical fix,” for instance, Danyluk (2018, 639) argues that:

… the accumulation of capital — and, by extension, the reproduction of capitalist social relations — hinges on the creation of particular kinds of spatial arrangements … [Capital] must fashion landscapes that are appropriate to the production, circulation, and realization of surplus value … Insofar as the built environment is a locus of investment and an object of exchange, space also becomes enlisted in the accumulation process as capital itself. (see also Harvey 1985)

The “enlisting” of space is, of course, always incomplete, even with the circulation of a commodity like electricity. By focusing on the frictions that arise in the transmission of electricity — both in the transformation of host communities and landscapes, but also the risks of wildfires, blackouts, protests, and sabotage — future research can problematize the technocratic illusion of a seamless grid.

State territorialization

The state is prominent in transmission development through the granting of rights-of-way, the use of eminent domain, the treatment of transmission as natural monopolies, and the role of nationalized energy companies and state energy planning (Cohn 2017; Hirsh 1999; Hughes 1983; Jones 2014; Wuebben 2019). Because energy utilities deliver a basic amenity, they often assume a peri-state status even in contexts when they are not directly state-owned, and the state may delegate decarbonization targets to energy capital via power purchasing agreements. Beyond state-capital dynamics, discussed in greater detail in the following section, transmission is evoked in the literature as an instrument of state territorialization: a mechanism for laying claim to space, resources, and influence both within and beyond borders.

Speaking to energy infrastructure more broadly, Bridge, Özkaynak, and Turhan (2018) argue that infrastructure acts as “veins of territory,” through which the circulation (or lack thereof) of energy co-constitutes national territoriality and subjectivities. Transmission infrastructure does political work for the state that exceeds the technical capacity to move energy. In some cases, transmission and associated energy infrastructure development is positioned as a prerequisite for state formation and independence, for instance in the former Soviet Union (Westphal, Pastukhova and Pepe 2022), European Economic Area (Hansen and Moe 2022), Laos (Dwyer 2020; Green and Baird 2020), Israel-Palestine (Fischhendler, Herman and Anderman 2016), Quebec (Desbiens 2004, 2009, 2013), and post-colonial east Asia (Chatterjee 2020), as grid infrastructure takes on nationalist character amidst concerns over energy security, autonomy, developmentalism, and nation-building.

Further research in this vein can draw on existing scholarship on pipelines, canals, and other linear infrastructures of extraction to consider how electricity transmission may operate as an “infrastructure of empire” (Cowen 2020) that entrenches state and capital presence in frontier areas (Enns, Bersaglio and Sneyd 2019) and indigenous territories (Curley 2021; Spice 2018). For Pasternak and Dafnos (2018), for example, Canadian state territoriality is coproduced through the ability to secure the circulation of commodities via transport infrastructures like pipelines. The protest of pipelines by indigenous nations then becomes an “emergency” for the state, not only because of the disruption of oil as a commodity but also because protesting the pipelines acts as a way of protesting the settler state's claims to indigenous lands and resources.

Understanding how such “emergencies” arise around transmission lines could provide a lens for understanding how electrification and the interconnection of renewables offer opportunities to (further) territorialize new energy frontiers, as transmission enables the networking of remote sites for solar, hydropower dams, and on-shore and off-shore wind into national energy grids. While geography has long studied conflicts over stock resources like coal, oil, or uranium, how might conflicts around sovereignty and the extraction of renewable flow resources differ? For instance, the verticality of the resource flows increasingly targeted for energy expansion — most notably off-shore wind — present connections to the expanding literature on vertical and volumetric territory (Billé 2020; Huber and McCarthy 2017; Kama and Kuchler 2019), as expanding transmission networks make it possible to territorialize airflows and marine waterways as geopolitical assets.

If the territorializing capacities of transmission act internally within the state's borders, transmission can also act externally as a geopolitical instrument. Because the circulation of energy occurs across borders, powerlines can extend one state's influence over another, though the literature is divided between what Vakulchuk, Overland, and Scholten (2020) term the “renewed conflict” and “reduced conflict” camps. Because transmission infrastructure is spatially fixed and capital-intensive, and because access to reliable and affordable energy has become a basic need, states cannot so easily “unplug” when conflict arises. While this has primarily been noted with pipeline infrastructure rather than electricity transmission (e.g., conflicts with Russian gas imports; see Bouzarovski, Bradshaw, and Wochnik 2015), increasing demands for electrification and clean energy, as well as innovations in transmission technology that allow for longer and thus more interconnected transmission systems, may lead to more interstate conflict.

Some scholars have argued that energy transition and widespread decarbonization can lead to reduced conflicts via interconnection by international electricity grids (Blondeel et al. 2021; Vakulchuk, Overland, and Scholten 2020). This is attributed both to renewable energy's purported democratizing and decentralizing properties and to the greater flexibility of electricity interconnections, which can be more easily rerouted than petroleum pipelines in response to hostilities. For Thaler and Hofmann (2022), however, cross-border electricity systems ultimately force states into an “impossible energy trinity” where they must choose between the competing goals of energy security, sustainability, and sovereignty (see also Baird and Quastel 2015; Fischhendler, Herman, and Anderman 2016; Hansen and Moe 2022).

In other cases, this “trinity” can be expanded to include humanitarian and decolonial concerns, with transnational electricity transmission serving to implicitly endorse conflict and occupation. As Allan, Lemaadel, and Lakhal (2022, 49) describe in the case of Western Sahara and Moroccan exports to the European Union and other West African countries:

… energy developments in occupied Western Sahara are about more than producing energy. They stake a colonial claim on a contested land and implicate foreign powers in this claim. That is, the Moroccan regime uses energy to recruit allies for its colonial project.

The geopolitics of transmission, particularly of low-carbon energy like Western Sahara's solar and wind, is therefore more complex than a simple binary between “renewed” and “reduced” conflicts.

Read together with transmission's contributions to energy metabolisms, attention to the circulatory nature of transmission foregrounds how state claims to space are embedded in their control over the flow of resources within and across borders. At the same time, electricity challenges geopolitical and symbolic borders: moving fluidly across transnational transmission lines, “implicating” interconnected grids with “contested” electrons, and intermingling national electricity networks as neighboring states seek to share the benefits of different grid assets.

Electricity capital

Luke and Huber (2022) introduce electricity capital as “a faction of capital” (1701) and “the nexus of state, regulatory, and financial relationships that shape private accumulation through electricity provision” (1700). They justify the distinctiveness of this faction based on electricity's role as a means of production, electricity provision's specific politicization as a “public service,” and its position at the conjunctions of the climate crisis, energy poverty, and economic development. As the liminal space between electricity production and consumption, transmission circulates capital by circulating electricity as a means of (re)production.

Most fundamentally, transmission has been productive as a space for considering the unique properties of electricity as a “quirky” (Özden-Schilling 2021) or “uncooperative” (Luke and Huber 2022, drawing from Bakker 2003) commodity. Electricity is “not matter but a flow” (Özden-Schilling 2021, 11), itself immaterial but deeply embedded in the material infrastructure of wires and cables, making electricity as a commodity and the grid as infrastructure difficult to disentangle. If we follow Anusas and Ingold (2015) in arguing that electricity's infrastructure “establishes an ultimately controlling apparatus, which secretly and inconspicuously organizes and directs the course of corporatized life from beneath (infra) the realms of everyday awareness” (550, italics in original), the (im)materiality of electricity and its centrality as a basic amenity give transmission (and distribution) owners major control over the means of (re)production. As electrical current flows along a gradient of electrical potential, the transmission sector accumulates value by circulating that electricity from sites of high supply to sites of high demand.

At the same time, electricity's (im)material characteristics present challenges for capital, which it attempts to manage through transmission infrastructure. Pending innovations in battery technology, electricity is difficult to store, so electricity production and consumption must be essentially perfectly managed within a grid to prevent blackouts or brownouts (Luke and Huber 2022; Özden-Schilling 2015, 2021). Given this lack of temporal flexibility, long-distance transmission offers spatial flexibility, connecting distant sites of generation and consumption to keep supply and demand in constant balance. This is seen as especially important with a switch to low-carbon sources, which are seen as more intermittent and variable than fossil fuel resources: as per a common industry refrain, transmission offers the ability to build a grid bigger than the weather. In turn, this offers a “flexibility fix” for capital by “facilitating the flow of electricity across space, allowing free mobility for capital across the landscape within which the grid extends” (Angel 2022, 921).

In this vein, transmission projects can act as a spatial and socioecological fix for capital (Ekers and Prudham 2017, 2018; Harvey 1985) as the construction of transmission infrastructure can serve to address capital's endemic crises through large-scale investment, facilitating greater circulation of electricity as a commodity, and enabling decarbonization amidst the climate crisis. While electricity transmission has been noted as a potential examples of this tendency (e.g., Luke and Huber 2022; McCarthy 2015), there have been few other studies that focus on transmission specifically (cf. Angel 2022; Fearn 2023; Spivey 2020).

Work on pipelines points to the potential productivity of applying the socioecological fix framework to transmission, with work exploring the role of pipelines in questions of reserve replacement and environmental impact assessments (Zalik 2015), demands for corporate transparency (Barry 2013), partnerships with conservation organizations (Enns, Bersaglio, and Sneyd 2019), or articulation with futures markets (Simpson 2019). Applying this framework to transmission would allow insights into how the spatial politics of fixed energy infrastructure shifts with electrification and decarbonization, as transmission enables or constrains widespread capital switching from fossil to renewable infrastructures (McCarthy 2015). What conflicts arise when “a ‘fix’ for capital [is not] a ‘fix’ for the climate” (Luke and Huber 2022, 1705)?

The complexities of electricity as a commodity and the power it vests in capital are conditioned by specific regulatory regimes, for instance electricity capital's status in some service areas as a natural monopoly. However, what was once a “textbook case” for regulation has increasingly been opened to competition (Breslau 2024, 2021; Hirsh 1999; Özden-Schilling 2021; Vogel 2020). In deregulated US states, for instance, ownership of generation, transmission, and distribution is separated. Transmission companies maintain ownership of transmission lines, but their operation is ceded to regional transmission operators who decide what generation will run, usually decided through regional wholesale electricity markets. In effect, this leads the transmission system to be partially socialized, but with access controlled by a third-party regulator guided by market principles (cf. Chatterjee 2020).

These grid operators, in turn, largely act as a technocratic “fraternity of experts” (Cohn 2017; see also Özden-Schilling 2016, 2021), generally unelected with little public oversight or participation, who manage supply and demand for electricity generators and utilities. This intermediate layer of decision-making between private capital and the state insulates electricity capital from calls for grid decarbonization and energy democratization. While these technomanagerial bodies are becoming targets for activists (e.g., Shankman 2022, 2023), their role in energy systems and decarbonization has yet to be systematically analyzed by energy geographers (though see work by Breslau 2024, 2021; Harrison 2022; Özden-Schilling 2015, 2021).

Amidst calls to reorganize how interstate electricity transmission is governed to be more similar to pipeline permitting (e.g., The Editorial Board 2023), there is a need to better understand the current system and the functioning of regional grid operators in relation to energy capital as quasi-state actors (see the work of the Regional Transmission Organization Governance initiative; RTOGov n.d.), particularly amidst calls for energy democracy, utility municipalization, and state ownership (Becker, Angel, and Naumann 2020; Luke and Huber 2022; Paul 2018).

Finally, more work needs to be done to situate the work of transmission as a subset of electrical capital in producing and reinforcing classed and racialized patterns of energy poverty and precarity. This reflects in part the analytical and sectoral distinctions between transmission and distribution, with distribution infrastructure leading more directly to questions and contestations over energy access, availability, and poverty. However, as Luke (2022) demonstrates, the politics of rate-hikes and their disproportionate impact on lower-income communities of color cannot be so easily divorced from “upstream” infrastructural investments and policies by utility companies, including investments in new or upgraded transmission. Bouzarovski and Simcock (2017) argue that such “end-use energy injustice … is a deeply geographical phenomenon” (645) rooted in the infrastructures that circulate (or fail to circulate) electricity to socioeconomically — and spatially — marginalized households.

Work by Conor Harrison (Harrison 2013a, 2013b, 2017, 2022) has similarly interrogated the role of utilities in the uneven development of energy system infrastructure and the “downstream” impacts of these developments on marginalized ratepayers. Focused on rural areas of the US South, Harrison's work reminds us that the rural geographies of transmission are also racialized ones. It is the regulatory environment between utility companies and the state — from the natural monopoly model to fragmented patchworks of electricity deregulation — that makes possible what Luke (2022, 1767) terms “racialized electricity capital as a state-supported circuit of accumulation.” In failing to circulate electricity reliably and affordably, transmission is entangled in larger projects of racial, class, and colonial exclusion.

Social contestation and justice

Building from its connections to spatially uneven metabolisms, state power, and capital accumulation, transmission development has always been and continues to be a site of social contestation. Two factors differentiate conflicts over transmission from other controversial energy projects.

The first, stemming from electricity's (im)materiality, is that conflicts over transmission lines are generally more focused on the qualities of the infrastructure rather than the energy being transmitted, whereas concerns over pipelines, for instance, are often de facto concerns about oil or gas and the risk of leakage. While early work on high-voltage transmission raised concerns over the human and ecological health impacts of electromagnetic fields (Young 1973, 1992), following improvements in line design and regulations, subsequent studies have found these risks to be negligible, even if health impacts and ambient noise remain an occasional concern of abutters (Wuebben 2019; though also see Sovacool, Carley, and Kiesling 2024). This complicates justice claims that often rest on ecological and epidemiological hazards to nearby human and more-than-human communities, instead pointing toward transmission as a spatial burden.

Speaking to its spatiality, the second factor is that transmission is linear, posing both site-specific impacts and cumulative impacts along routes that cross multiple property lines, ecosystems, and jurisdictional boundaries, sometimes transnationally, which in turn complicates project planning and permitting. Cumulative impacts tend to be the dominant concerns of host communities, making conflicts over transmission into conflicts over and across landscapes.

Transmission infrastructure by definition traverses some communities and landscapes to deliver energy to other places without (directly) delivering energy to the spaces it bisects, imposing the burden of what is often locally unwanted landscape change for the benefit of the broader system's energy needs. Electricity transmission corridors sometimes raise concerns about habitat fragmentation (Strevens, Puotinen, and Whelan 2008), but the dominant public discourse has focused on the impacts of “visual pollution” (Wuebben 2019; see also Kroot 2020; Vandehey 2013; Wuebben 2017). While powerlines can be buried to minimize visual impacts, with added benefits for storm resilience and fire prevention, this increases the costs of construction for electricity capital (Kroot 2024). Other than a short-lived attempt to design more aesthetic powerlines, Wuebben (2019) explains that this has led to narrow solutions of pushing communities to learn to ignore powerlines or displacing them to less-powerful communities less likely to succeed in opposing their construction.

The multi-scalarity of transmission complicates the procedures of transmission siting and permitting, encompassing hyperlocal negotiation around property easements, municipal master plans, state permitting, regional grid planning, federal regulation, and international climate targets. Many of the rationales given for opposition to transmission stem from real or perceived privileging of certain governance scales over others, especially between rural and urban areas (Naumann and Rudolph 2020; Tate 2021; Wellstone and Casper 1981).

Pied (2021), for instance, attributes rural opposition to transmission development in western Maine to an anti-establishment politics that views public access to Maine's forests as jeopardized by “insider” coalitions of large landowners, power companies, politicians, and government agencies. Pied argues that these concerns go beyond right-wing populism in rural politics, “revealing a nonpartisan frustration with the growing power of capital and the willingness of the state to enable this power” (294). This reflects a growing frustration with the technomanagerialism of grid governance and energy planning and speaks to broader critiques that environmental, energy, and climate justice needs to reach beyond the state in pursuit of its goals (Pulido, Kohl, and Cotton 2016).

In turn, the different scalar framings from which transmission can be evaluated have been a strategic resource for decision-makers in constraining public contestation. Accusations of the Not-In-My-Backyard movement (NIMBYism), for instance, operate to paint local contestation to new energy infrastructure as selfish and thus dismissible when weighed against the broader energy needs of society (Bell, Gray, and Haggett 2005; Bell et al. 2013; Burningham 2000; Devine-Wright 2009), contributing to tensions between the urgency of decarbonization and the slow work of public participation (Kroot 2024; Newell, Geels, and Sovacool 2022; Skjølsvold and Coenen 2021; Wahlund and Palm 2022).

While these dynamics are common across energy infrastructures, transmission's specific unevenness between (typically rural) host communities and (typically urban or suburban) load centers, as well as its enabling role in the interconnection of new energy resources, makes multi-scalarity central to siting controversies. In some cases, the multi-scalarity of transmission can pose important avenues for coalition-building that empower diverse publics. Contentious transmission projects in exurban areas have been the locus of rural populist organizing (Kroot 2020; Pied 2021; Wellstone and Casper 1981; cf. Bosworth 2022), drawing together unlikely coalitions of farmers, retirees, second-home owners, tourism workers, environmentalists, and indigenous activists. The multiple scales of transmission, in turn, impact project acceptability and support: Devine-Wright and Batel (2017) found that in the United Kingdom, greater social acceptance of new transmission lines was correlated with greater degrees of extra-local place attachment.

However, transmission's technomanagerialism has insulated the sector from some of the politicization that has become common for energy extraction, generation, and consumption, contributing to contestations over transmission development being framed around narrow questions of acceptability. Batel, Devine-Wright, and Tangeland (2013) draw from transmission conflicts in the United Kingdom and Norway to argue that the language of “acceptance” reflects a top-down approach to transmission development where the public is expected to passively adopt plans from electricity capital, the state, and grid operators. Reframing discussions of transmission development toward garnering “support” begins to re-orient governance questions toward fair compensation for hosting locally unwanted but socially necessary infrastructure, gaining community buy-in, and greater democratization of energy planning (see also Neukirch 2020; Sovacool, Carley, and Kiesling 2024). While the literature on NIMBYism has tended to focus on questions of distributive justice, greater attention should be paid to questions of procedural justice in how decisions are made in the first place, which is exacerbated by the ambivalence about whether hosting a transmission line constitutes an environmental burden.

Following work on contestations around energy production and consumption (Avila et al. 2022; Bouzarovski and Simcock 2017; O'Sullivan, Golubchikov, and Mehmood 2020; Sareen and Haarstad 2018; Yenneti, Day, and Golubchikov 2016), there is therefore room to apply the concept of spatial justice to transmission. As Bouzarovski and Simcock (2017, 642) explain:

The concept of “spatial justice” requires both the description and evaluation of spatial inequalities as well as an examination of the geographical processes through which these injustices are (re)produced … Space is not a neutral container within which the social world “happens” — rather, it is socially constructed through social relations and practices, and space in turn constitutes those very relationships and practices. Therefore, space not only provides a backdrop for the manifestation of inequalities, but also actively produces and maintains them (see also Soja 2009).

Such a spatial justice approach to transmission would require a systemic analysis of the power dynamics that produce certain spaces as sites of energy transportation and not others. For example, transmission siting typically relies on right-of-way easements, many of which were initially granted to transmission owners under very different circumstances, such as rural electrification. Because transmission owners can access their existing transmission rights-of-way for free, they often propose redeveloping larger-scale projects in these smaller rights-of-way, using access rights originally granted for local benefits to industrialize corridors for the benefit of distant load centers. The presence of one infrastructural burden justifies the siting of others, leaving rural host communities with “altered landscapes and continued peripherality” (O'Sullivan, Golubchikov, and Mehmood 2020, 5).

Transmission, however, also demonstrates how spatial justice might be in productive tension with the concept of cosmopolitan justice. Cosmopolitan justice is “based on the principle that everyone is a citizen of the world” (Droubi, Heffron, and McCauley 2022, 10; see also Delina and Janetos 2018; Heffron, McCauley, and Sovacool 2015; Iwińska, Lis, and Mączka 2021; Jenkins et al. 2021) and thus that justice questions must always be debated across all scales, local to global. In this view, debates over justice around transmission siting and permitting encompass not only host communities along the line but also the ripple effects across the globe, from the sourcing of supply chains to the emissions accrued or reduced by the proposed transmission and the electricity it carries. As Droubi, Heffron, and McCauley (2022) argue more broadly, this cosmopolitanism makes it incredibly challenging to balance the local concerns central to spatial justice against dispersed impacts, positive and negative, across the globe, far outside the nominal jurisdictions of regulatory and permitting authorities.

Particularly when it is developed to facilitate low-carbon energy transitions, transmission may embody these tensions between spatial justice for host communities and cosmopolitan justice in the face of global climate change — while also pointing toward ways to reconcile these normative mandates. For instance, existing transmission rights-of-way can be made to carry additional electricity without expanding the visual footprint for host communities through line burial or the use of advanced reconductoring and “grid-enhancing technologies” — alternatives sometimes resisted by electricity capital as unnecessary costs when developers can use their existing overhead rights-of-way for free. More fundamentally, siting and permitting procedures that prioritize spatial justice for host communities may in fact be a path toward cosmopolitan justice, to the extent that they preempt costly delays and project cancellations due to local opposition (Kroot 2024).

Similarly, transmission can act as a bridge between spatial and cosmopolitan justice claims when it acts as a medium for scale-jumping, allowing marginalized communities at the point of extraction or energy generation to connect with parties “downstream” in the energy system, paralleling anti-pipeline movements (Bosworth 2022; Estes 2019). Indigenous Cree and Inuit activists protesting hydroelectric development on the Great Whale River in Quebec, for instance, targeted consumers and decision-makers along proposed powerlines in New York and Vermont, which ultimately led to the defeat of the planned dams (Cooren 2001; Desbiens 2013; McRae 2004). While such coalition and solidarity building are not unique to transmission, the materiality of the connection between communities and landscapes along the line provides a medium for organizing across scalar framings of just energy systems.