John Arnold

I really worry about if energy becomes a choke point in the U.S., it has real ramifications for the strategic ranking of this country.

Not only is it a good narrative, but it's true.

If energy becomes the constraint, we will become less competitive vis-a-vis China.

Transmission is certainly a component of it.

It's not the only component.

You can talk about supply chains, can talk about land use, but transmission is a huge component of it.

I actually started a company about five years ago trying to build inter-regional transmission lines because it was an industry that had become so difficult to permit and build that private capital had largely given up trying to do new projects.

And it's one of the solutions that can be a win-win-win for everybody.

We weren't talking about the goals of the system, right?

It can reduce costs.

It can increase reliability.

It can reduce emissions.

It can make the country more secure.

It can create more jobs.

But yet it had gotten so hard to build these lines.

It is still very hard to build these lines that most of the developers who had gotten started with projects in the 2000s gave up.

They started things thinking these were going to be five-year projects, and they were 10-plus years in, and many of them hadn't broken ground yet.

Again, this is part of the challenge of America.

It just takes so long, and part of this is there's not one entity that can just say, okay, do it.

There are multiple veto points along the way, and you have to convince a lot of different actors of this project.