The Bureau of Land Management has approved a multistate power line project originally planned to carry renewable energy across the desert Southwest but now being billed as a necessary upgrade to an aging and increasingly overstressed regional power grid.
The 214-mile-long Cross-Tie power line is projected to carry about 1,500 megawatts of electricity — enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes — across mostly federal tracts between central Utah and east central Nevada.
BLM’s record of decision approving the project, issued last week, calls for routing the 500-kilovolt high-tower line across about 174 miles of bureau rangelands, mostly following existing power lines.
The Forest Service issued a separate final approval for an 8-mile section of the line that will cross the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.
