An international who’s who of billionaire green investors are attempting to turn President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 recovery into the equivalent of hot air. Led by Bill Gates, his Breakthrough Energy has just initiated the Macro Grid Initiative (MGI), a project to link U.S. cities ("consumers") with rural heartlands ("producers” of most of the wind and solar power in the U.S.) with a network of long-distance transmission lines. The MGI was announced June 17, about two weeks after Trump put his administration to focus on infrastructure projects as part of the COVID-19 recovery effort.
This MGI project is not exactly new; a smaller version had been championed by T. Boone Pickens in 2007 (before being abandoned in 2012), aimed at the Oklahoma/Texas region. To achieve their re-heated green vision, Macro Grid would have to change both state and federal laws, since it aims to ship power long distances, traversing state lines, but also “grid” boundaries, designed to be isolated systems, as a safety factor. Currently defined, the North American (continental U.S. and Canada, minus Yukon) electric grid is divided into eight sectors, which share very little power across their boundaries. (Readers may remember the collapse of the Ohio grid in 2003, which could have brought down the entire country were it not for these protections.)
