BALTIMORE – A New Jersey-based electric company wants to drive a 70-mile, high-voltage transmission line through three Central Maryland counties. But it will first have to contend with all the preserved lands that stand in the way.
The Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), the project’s developer, plans to submit a permit application to the Maryland Public Service Commission by the end of the year. If built, the 500,000-volt overhead line is projected to start transporting electricity in June 2027.
PJM Interconnection, which operates the power grid in the Mid-Atlantic region, contracted with PSEG last December to build the $424 million transmission line. Its purpose is to connect an existing Baltimore Gas and Electric transmission line right-of-way in northern Baltimore Country with the Doubs substation in southern Frederick County.
PSEG has developed 10 possible routes between those two points for public review. The maps show potential paths tracking through farmland, wetlands, forests, preserved properties and other environmentally sensitive areas.
Among them: Gunpowder Falls State Park and the Prettyboy Reservoir, a major source of drinking water for the Baltimore area.
Conservation groups and other critics warn that allowing the project to move forward would undo hard-won and costly protections on thousands of acres of land and threaten the rural character of many communities.
“I cannot cut a tree down on my property because of forest conservation,” said Joanne Frederick, who owns a 100-acre Baltimore County farm. Most of her land is protected from development by a constellation of easements, but it is nonetheless in the way of one proposed route. “The path they have chosen will take out old-growth forests that were baby trees when my father was born here.”
The project is part of PJM’s $5 billion push to expand transmission infrastructure across its territory, which covers all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia.
The Maryland transmission line is needed, according to PJM, to handle the nearly 40% increase in energy demand expected throughout the grid operator’s multistate footprint by 2040 — much of it driven by data center growth in Northern Virginia. The grid operator also points to shifts in power generation, with solar and wind facilities replacing outgoing traditional fossil fuel plants.
“We’re seeing for the first time in a very long time larger demand in electricity,” said PJM spokeswoman Susan Buehler. “The current infrastructure in Maryland is not enough and can’t support additional electricity.”
Hostility toward the line, dubbed the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MPRP), intensified over the summer.
Angry residents packed public informational meetings. The Maryland Farm Bureau denounced the project, saying it would threaten 1,300 acres of farmland. A new community opposition group, called Stop MPRP, began flooding inboxes and social media with anti-transmission line arguments. And elected officials from all three affected counties criticized the project.
The Frederick County Council voted unanimously Sept. 3 to send a letter of opposition to the Maryland Public Service Commission. “I’m very glad we were able to come together as a body and come to verbiage that works for all of us,” Councilman Mason Carter said shortly before the vote, “because we ought to make a stand when someone walks into Frederick County and blatantly violates our property rights.”
Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski, in his own letter, questioned the need for a new line and pressed for a ban on employing eminent domain to get it built. He also suggested using existing rights-of-way as much as possible instead to “protect our environment by maintaining the integrity of our conservation easements and preserved lands.”
And in Carroll County, the Board of County Commissioners published a “unified” statement condemning the project. An analysis conducted by the county’s planning department in July found that between 30 and 45 farms with conservation easements would be impacted within the county.
State, local and private interests have invested millions of dollars over the years to protect such lands from just this kind of threat, said Christopher Heyn, who oversees Carroll’s planning department.
“These particular farms that have easements on them have been determined to be valuable properties that support all these goals of these [conservation] programs,” he added. “To negatively impact them goes contrary to the goals of those programs.”
The counties have no authority to approve or deny the project. That power lies with the state Public Service Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
PJM officials say PSEG is responsible for developing and finalizing a route. PSEG declined to comment for this report. The company’s project fact sheet acknowledges that the project will have “temporary and permanent impacts” on the environment but asserts that those will be offset by “mitigation measures” as required by law.
“PSEG is committed to environmental stewardship and will work to minimize and mitigate the environmental impacts to the greatest extent practical,” the fact sheet states.
The company says it would only invoke eminent domain as a “last resort.” As for farming, PSEG says that animal grazing and row crops likely can continue beneath the transmission line. But it cautions that taller vegetation, such as trees or nursery stock, may not allow for enough clearance in some situations.
More than two dozen conservation organizations have signed a letter raising concerns about the project’s impacts to preserved lands. The alliance, led by the group Forever Maryland, argues that taking back the easements would diminish the public’s confidence in land preservation programs.
Joanne Frederick worries what will become of her beloved farm if the transmission line crosses it. Her shock led her to help found Stop MPRP.
“This project is ruthless in its damage — businesses homes, water, forests, wetlands,” she said. “It is equivalent to a foreign nation coming into Maryland with 150-foot-wide tanks and taking out a whole swath and walking away.”
Theaux Le Gardeur, the Gunpowder Riverkeeper, struggles to fathom the effect the project would have on the 18,000-acre Gunpowder Falls State Park and its namesake river. His biggest worry is that vast felling of trees to make way for the line will lead to more sunlight reaching streams that are among the few remaining cold refuges for brook trout, an important recreational species.
“Look at how forested this is,” he said, hiking through a thicket of green shoots and towering trees just yards from where one of the proposed routes would run through the park. “I can tell you that not one route is going to be better than the others in terms of impact to natural resources.”
While I’m happy with SMECO, we do need another competitor down yonder southern maryland. Same with internet providers. You would think, in an area where we have the “technology corridor”, that we’d have some more options and some better service area.