For starters, Cascadia has no plan.

Editor's note: This is the first of three articles discussing the major challenges - planning, permitting, and paying for it - to building out the transmission lines needed to transition to a cleaner energy future.

Electric transmission lines - those giant high-voltage wires that zap electricity across long distances - recently graduated from a fringe topic to a core challenge in the quest to decarbonize Cascadia. More leaders and climate hawks now recognize the centrality of transmission capacity to meeting climate goals, but that recognition has yet to yield action. The Northwest grid is jammed, and hundreds of wind and solar projects are languishing as a result. Neither the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) nor Northwest utilities - nor anyone else, for that matter - is building the new transmission lines necessary to power millions of households and businesses in Cascadia with clean electricity. Why?

Much of the national conversation diagnosing impediments to new wires in the United States focuses on complex and lengthy permitting processes and their adjacent challenge: local communities' opposition to new energy projects in their backyards. But a smooth permitting process is only one leg of the three-legged stool that successful transmission projects rest on. The other two are adequate planning and the right incentives for paying for the expensive lines.

Sightline looked into each of these three barriers in the unique context of Cascadia. This article, part of a series investigating the challenges of building transmission lines, focuses on planning.

If transmission lines aren't planned, they aren't built. And if transmission lines aren't built, neither are new wind turbines or solar farms, prolonging our dependence on planet-destroying, war-fueling oil, coal, and gas. But the organizations that plan Cascadia's future wires (largely, BPA and utilities) are plodding along the same way they have for years, ticking boxes and averting their gaze from the impending new demands on the grid. Meanwhile, Cascadia is on fire, and heatwaves are shattering temperature records around the world.

A different way forward is both imperative and entirely possible. Instead of betting our future on outdated, fractured, and myopic planning processes, Northwest leaders could establish a new regional transmission planning entity with the authority and resources to shepherd the region's grid into the twenty-first century. Until they do, Cascadia's climate ambitions grow more precarious by the year.

CASCADIA'S TRANSMISSION PLANNING PROCESS: FRACTURED, SHORTSIGHTED, AND PERPETUALLY BEHIND THE TIMES

"A goal without a plan is just a wish," author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is said to have written. If you ask anyone at BPA or a Northwest utility whether they are planning the grid for the future, they will assure you that they are. But plunge into the murky depths of transmission planning processes yourself and you will quickly become alarmed that Cascadia's audacious climate goals may turn out to be mere wishes unless we chart a different course.

Since 2011 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has required all utilities that own transmission wires to participate in regional planning processes. In the Northwest, NorthernGrid leads that process. The group counts 16 members, including BPA, the region's investor-owned utilities (e.g., Portland General Electric [PGE], Puget Sound Energy [PSE]), and some municipal utilities (e.g., Seattle City Light).

But NorthernGrid is ill prepared for the task at hand: ushering the Northwest's grid into an entirely new era dominated by climate change. The association has no full-time staff, no independent leadership, and is not accountable to state regulators or policymakers. It is essentially a small club of BPA and the biggest power utilities in the region that meets the letter, but not the spirit, of FERC's planning requirements.

For evidence of these def...