SUGARLOAF, Pa. \u2014 For John Zola, the 40 acres were like a paradise: apple orchards tucked into northern Pennsylvania’s rolling hills, a barn, meadows and more than enough land for four houses: one for himself and his wife and each of his three adult children.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been \u201chell,\u201d however, since a contractor hired by the local power utility knocked on Zola’s door in late 2024 and informed him that it planned to build a 500-kilovolt power line through his property.<\/p>\n
The 240-foot metal towers would reach 10 times as high as the century-old apple trees they’d plow through and loom over the Zolas’ homes and the basketball court and swimming pool where his grandchildren play.<\/p>\n
This line and others like it are being planned in accelerating numbers in the United States to deliver power, sometimes across hundreds of miles, to enormous data centers run by the world’s biggest tech companies.<\/p>\n
Although advances in artificial intelligence<\/a> are seen by President Donald Trump as critical to the nation’s economic and national security, their energy needs are threatening to overwhelm the power grid \u2014 and people like Zola are caught in the middle.<\/p>\n The local utility, PPL, said it did everything it could to balance the impact on people with its obligation to deliver electricity and protect grid reliability. But to Zola, all they care about is money.<\/p>\n \u201cThey don\u2019t look at whose lives they are destroying, whose property they are destroying,\u201d Zola said.<\/p>\n Big power lines, big data centers<\/p>\n These high-voltage power lines are the latest front line in the battle over tech firms’ massive operations.<\/p>\n Angry local opposition<\/a> has sprouted against dozens of the behemoth data centers amid fears of rising electricity costs and irreparable damage to their communities.<\/p>\n Opponents of transmission projects are similarly motivated: they say the lines are intruding on the sanctity of private land and threatening long-lasting harm to sensitive public lands, farms, property values and pristine waterways \u2014 all for electricity that they don\u2019t think benefits them.<\/p>\n Transmission projects have always faced challenges and yearslong permitting processes, and two decades of relatively flat power demand didn’t inject much urgency.<\/p>\n But analysts say the grid remains inefficient, aging and, with demand spiking, on the verge of causing widespread blackouts on the coldest or hottest days. Utilities contend that any new transmission line \u2014 even those driven primarily by large customers, like data centers or industrial sites \u2014 benefits everyone by adding capacity to the grid.<\/p>\n Some members of Congress want to exclude lines from state or certain environmental reviews, while some tech companies are trying to build their own<\/a> power plants, or next to one<\/a>, in part to avoid a quagmire.<\/p>\n These transmission projects aren’t local power lines on wooden poles. Rather, these are lines on steel towers five or six times as tall, carrying power in bulk across long distances.<\/p>\n Some \u2014 like the Sugarloaf project that could cross Zola’s property \u2014 require 200-foot-wide corridors.<\/p>\n Caught in the middle<\/p>\n Utility giants are forecasting that their spending growth will be driven primarily by transmission projects, with transmission spending projected to double to nearly $50 billion a year from 2019 to 2028.<\/p>\n But the expansion is eliciting opposition from landowners, conservationists, local officials, consumer advocates and even states.<\/p>\n In Texas’ Hill Country, the Hill Country Preservation Coalition sprang up against the construction of the southernmost of three 765-kilovolt lines \u2014 the highest voltage used in the United States \u2014 that Texas regulators commissioned to cross the state in east-west \u201csuperhighway\u201d corridors.<\/p>\n The coalition’s founder, Jada Jo Smith, calls it a \u201cGoliath\u201d that will be nearly impossible to defeat. To at least minimize the damage, the coalition is pressing state regulators to adopt a different, slightly longer path that follows existing highway corridors.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy would you choose a route that would potentially harm our most iconic rivers that we have left in the state of Texas?\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n \u2018These are real dollars\u2019<\/p>\n Pennsylvania\u2019s state consumer advocate, Darryl Lawrence, is protesting a $1.7 billion proposed line spanning more than 200 miles from West Virginia across half Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n