Published
January 2025
Authors
DNV and Americans for a Clean Energy Grid

Key Takeaways

This report seeks to enable the timely expansion and upgrading of the United States’ electric grid through a focus on building trust and working collaboratively across a broad spectrum of community interests.

Expanding the transmission grid requires both technical expertise and strategic community engagement. To this end, ACEG and DNV convened a Roundtable to identify best practices for community engagement when developing transmission lines. The Roundtable process focused on including a comprehensive set of community interests and, from there, identifying consensus-based best practices. Notably, the Roundtable included the following community interests: agriculture; energy, climate, and environmental justice; Indigenous; environmental, nature, and wildlife advocacy; labor; local workforce development; utilities; and transmission developers.

The report presents dozens of consensus-based best practices for community engagement and benefits which will help address potential tensions early on, providing the flexibility to discover mutually agreeable and timely solutions. The findings and recommendations are further consolidated into the PACE framework, which highlights a critical insight: the speed of transmission project development often corresponds with the level of trust built with affected communities.

The framework highlights four core areas of importance for community engagement and benefits:

  • Participation and engagement of communities
  • Accountability and good governance
  • Communication, transparency and trust
  • Economic and non-economic benefits

ACEG and DNV offer several actionable recommendations — some already regionally implemented — to enhance community participation and benefits in transmission development. In addition to project-agnostic initiatives, the report includes recommendations that are time-bound and specific to the different phases of the transmission development process, including planning, routing, and siting and permitting.