Former state legislator Chris Hansen talks about storage but also the need to create a better network of transmission lines across the country. What will it take?
by Allen Best
Chris Hansen grew up in the small town of Goodland. It’s in Kansas, a few miles from the Colorado border. Interstate 70 runs past the town, putting Goodland within a three-hour drive of Denver.
The interstate highway across the Great Plains was completed before Hansen was born in 1975 but he has studied the legislative history of what it took for Congress to approve 90% funding. He credits President Dwight Eisenhower with coming up with the winning strategy in the 1950s.
That legislative history regarding interstate highways, he contended at a recent conference, holds a lesson in how electrical transmission in the United States can be expanded. Eisenhower cited national security in breaking a deadlock on the interstate debate in Congress.
Natural security can also be the key argument to get Congress to act now to make more transmission permitting easier, asserting a stronger federal role, said Hansen at the American Clean Power’s ReCharge Energy Storage Conference on Sept. 22.
The national conference held at the Gaylord Rockies Resorts and Convention Center near DIA gathered roughly 600 people. The hotel is monstrously large, with 1,500 rooms and ambitions to double its capacity. The rooms cost $300 a night this time of year. The conference agenda about storage and related topics was also rich enough to generate two and half days of discussions.
Hansen firmly believes in energy storage. At La Plata Electric Association, he has been working to get approval of the Durango-based 50,000-member cooperative’s first utility-scale battery storage, five megawatts of four- to six-hour lithium-ion phosphate batteries. That technology currently is the “best bang for the buck,” he said, and La Plata expects to complete that project in 2027.
La Plata needs much more storage, roughly enough in the next five or six years to meet about a third of the cooperative’s peak demand of 160 megawatts. Longer-duration batteries conceivably will be part of the mix. The cooperative serves primarily La Plata and Archuleta counties but has members in several adjoining counties.
Hansen also reported that La Plata is promoting a host of storage-related options that fall under the heading of virtual power plants: grid-connected hot-water heaters and grid-connected air-source heat pumps, plus garage batteries at both residential and commercial scales. Those technologies can benefit individual members of the cooperative while also benefitting the broader electric grid.
In this evolving utility model, a fundamental shift is underway. The electricity can move in both directions. The cooperative can buy electricity from batteries of members as well as sell it. This is opposite of the old paradigm of electricity utilities, where the power flowed only one way.
Hansen is a bright bulb. He started his collegiate career studying nuclear engineering at Kansas State, went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then capped his formal education by earning a Ph.D. in natural resources economics from Oxford University. He then worked around the world before settling in Denver and getting elected to the Colorado Legislature in 2016.
Under Colorado’s golden dome, Hansen was the prime sponsor of several bills intended to move along Colorado’s energy transition. SB21-072 created the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority, giving it authority and tools to do things individual utilities might not want to. Maybe even more important, that same law requires electric utilities to join in a broader electricity-sharing market, commonly called a regional transmission organization, no later than 2030.
“You know, the West has long been a Balkanized place when it comes to generating and transmission,” Hansen said at the conference.
To this day, Colorado remains something of an island, with few connections to other parts of the Western interconnection grid. There are still 37 separate balancing authorities in the Western grid. The Eastern interconnection grid starts at Nebraska and Kansas.
Transmission lines in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Photo/Allen Best
On April 1, a new electricity-sharing organization, Southwest Power Pool, launched its Markets+ program with La Plata, Platte River Power Authority and Tri-State Generation and Transmission among its inaugural members.
The new SPP electricity-sharing organization, as currently constituted, is just a start. Hansen said it has too few members, too little electricity for sharing, just four and half gigawatts of electricity to share in the Western grid.
“You really need 10 or 15 gigawatts to get the full benefit of RTOs. It’s imperative that we get more critical mass and grow the footprints of these organized markets for them to work in the long term,” said Hansen.
“I want to be very clear about that. I don’t think the status quo is sustainable. We’re going to have to do better. I think there are lots of ways for that to happen. And now it’s really a matter of people starting to make those decisions, commit, and invest accordingly.”
Hansen named no names, but Xcel Energy, with upward of 60% of the electricity demand in Colorado, has been hesitant.
Part of the discussion in Colorado and beyond during the last 10 to 15 years has been whether utilities should join SPP or CAISO, as the California Independent System Operator is called. CAISO was long viewed with suspicion, because it was not independent of California’s state government. At least some of that independence has now been gained. Hansen insisted SPP and CAISO can co-exist in the Western grid and work together, provided good “seams agreements” are in place.
What matters entirely, said Hansen, is the ability to deliver price signals. Markets — as SPP is doing and CAISO is doing on the West Coast — do that.
Fully functional markets, he also said, should reduce the amount of generating capacity needed by utilities, what is called reserved margins, to ensure confidence they can meet demand with mostly renewable energy.
But, as with farm productionof old, there is this matter of getting the electricity to markets. Railroads did it in the old days. That’s how sugar beets got from fields in northeastern Colorado to factories in Fort Morgan, Greeley and other towns.
Improved highways expedited movement of food to cities. Then came the four-lane interstate highways to deliver goods across great distances. Broccoli grown in California during January can get to Denver overnight (provided they don’t try to use I-70 after the lifts close or, for that matter, I-25 through Denver, mornings or afternoons).
The question posed to Hansen at the conference seemed to have been shared in advance: “If you were Eisenhower for a day and could build the interstate transmission highway, what would you do to expedite that?”
“I think it’s a wonderful historical reference about this challenge,” responded Hansen. “I think that is exactly the right way to think about this urgency.”
Utility managers in Colorado and beyond have often said that the nation must be better knitted together through the electric equivalent of four-lane highways to meet expanding needs of electricity with renewables. “Bigger than one weather system or one time zone,” Hansen and presumably others have said.
But transmission lines notoriously take many years to get built. Xcel Energy’s 345-kV Colorado Power Pathway, which is to loop for 500 miles around eastern Colorado, is an exception. Four of the five segments have been completed or soon will be. The project as approved in 2021.
Nationally, though, the pace has been slow. A transmission line to export electricity generated by wind in southern Wyoming to cities in southwestern states took something like 17 years to get fully permitted.
In 2025, according to Statista, 792 miles of new transmission were completed in the United States — and Colorado presumably was responsible for several hundred of those miles.
The story, most fundamentally, is that very few people want to see giant transmission lines outside their back porches. And states commonly think of themselves and less so of regional needs.
That’s where the interstate comes in. The idea of a national system of four-lane highways had been pitched to President Franklin Roosevelt in the late 1930s. By the 1950s, Congress was ready to take up the idea of building 50,000 miles of four-lane highways. Approval was dragged down by provincialism. Members of Congress weren’t willing to allow others to get funding in what amounted to turf battles, said Hansen.
The president, said Hansen, had realized from his time in the military that sometimes you have to make the problem bigger to solve it.
“So he went back to Congress and said, ‘We’re going to get this done, and it’s not just about roads. It’s about national security. And if we need to move troops quickly across the country.” A design criteria of interstate highways is that every third mile must be designed to accommodate landing a bomber. This was the time of the Cold War, of course, and this argument worked.
The same argument about national security may work today, said Hansen — and, he added, it’s one he believes.
“If you care seriously about better environmental performance, the only way we’re going to get reduced emissions is to improve the national grid. And so I think this is a moment for an Eisenhower approach to this problem. And I’m hopeful – cross your fingers – that it stays bipartisan.”
Hansen did not say this, but a book published in 1997 (“Divided Highways,” by Tom Lewis) pointed out that the interstate highway overpasses that were built in fact had too little space for passage of key military equipment. The national security argument may have (or may not have*) congealed bipartisan support in Congress, but execution was another matter.
As for the bipartisan element, Hansen said he has his fingers crossed that permitting reform may get approved by a more bipartisan federal government after the mid-term elections.
“My hope is after midterms there’ll be some space open for that opportunity. I’m seeing some rays of hope just on bipartisan legislation on permitting reform,” he said. He cited examples from the past, most famously the unlikely compromises in the 1980s of President Ronald Reagan and U.S. Rep. Tip O’Neill, the speaker of the House in which Democrats were a majority.
“That is what this moment calls for,” said Hansen. “I’d like to think as a country that we still have the connective tissue to do that, and it’s time for those leaders to step forward, you know, stick their necks out a little bit.”
* Chris Hansen credited President Dwight Eisenhower with making the case for federal funding of a national system of four-lane highways by citing the need for national security. In this, he repeated a popular notion. That may be particularly true in Colorado where we commonly abbreviate the name of the twin tunnels of I-70 to the “Eisenhower Tunnel.”
National security seems to have been part of the conversation. The nation was in the grips of the Cold War. Fear abounded, as this writer can attest, having wondered as a child whether the drone of airplanes overhead in the still of night had been dispatched by Russia to drop a nuclear bomb on Cheyenne Mountain, the defense establishment at Colorado Springs.
I-25 connects three state capitols: Cheyenne, Denver and Santa Fe, including this segment in northern New Mexico. Photo/Allen Best
Childish minds can make giant —and fearful — leaps of imagination. As can those of adults, for that matter. Among that child’s relatives was a distant twice-removed great aunt who had become fearful of communists behind the trees in her community of God-fearing farmers. In our current political environment, of course, we now have attempts to incite similar fears.
As for Eisenhower’s role in the passage of the 1956 Federal-Aid Act that provided the funding and blueprint for the interstate construction, Wikipedia says it has been exaggerated. He did appoint a general to an advisory group, but the proposal that came from that group was overwhelming defeated by Congress in 1955.
Also of note: Eisenhower in 1955 and into 1956 was recovering from a heart attack suffered while on a fishing vacation to Fraser. In what is a curious footnote, the winning proposal came from a band of Democratic legislators that included Al Gore Sr., father of the later vice president.
What also must be noted is Eisenhower’s address to Congress in February 1955. In that speech, he made the case for improved highways, citing several arguments about economic development. He also said this: “In case of an atomic attack on our key cities, the road net must permit quick evacuation of target areas, mobilization of defense forces and maintenance of every essential economic function. But the present system in critical areas would be the breeder of a deadly congestion within hours of an attack.”
Further into the historical weeds, it can also be noted that idea of a national network of federal highways that at least conceptually looked like what became the interstate highway system became was pitched in Washington D.C. in 1938.
For those who want to dive deeper, “The Historical Presidency: “Giving government to business”: Dwight Eisenhower and the Federal Highway Act,” by Charles Zug, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri at Columbia, can provide some insight.
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