Spanning three time zones, one power line could quietly reshape how America shares electricity, but only if utilities, regulators, and landowners can align across a decade of obstacles
America’s power grid is divided into regions that rarely share electricity across their boundaries. That’s largely still true today — but a 420-mile transmission line now in development could change it in a way nothing has before.
Grid United’s North Plains Connector would link three separate U.S. grid regions across three time zones, from the West through the Great Plains to the Upper Midwest. At 3 gigawatts and an estimated $6 billion, the project is technically unprecedented. It’s also, by the account of the people building it, extraordinarily difficult to pull off.
A grid divided against itself
The U.S. power grid wasn’t designed as a single unified system. It evolved over decades into a patchwork of regional networks — the Western Interconnection, the Eastern Interconnection, and the Texas grid — each operating largely on its own terms. Connections between these regions exist, but they’re rare and limited in capacity.
Skelly’s previous company, Clean Line Energy Partners, shut down in 2019 without completing any of the five transmission lines it had pursued.
That fragmentation has real costs. Study after study has shown that interregional links can deliver major reliability and economic benefits, yet those benefits are hard to quantify when nothing comparable has ever been built. Utilities and regulators need clearly defined long-term returns before committing to a multibillion-dollar investment. It’s a catch-22: the evidence is hard to generate without the infrastructure, and the infrastructure is hard to approve without the evidence.
What the North Plains Connector would actually do
The North Plains Connector would run 420 miles between Montana and North Dakota, carrying up to 3 gigawatts of electricity using high-voltage direct current technology. That technical choice matters. HVDC lines enable two-way power flows — energy can move in either direction depending on where it’s needed — and those flows can backfill shortfalls across entire regional networks, not just between the two endpoints.
The line would bridge three distinct grid regions: the U.S. West, the Great Plains, and the Upper Midwest. These regions span three time zones, which means their peak demand periods don’t always overlap. That’s the core opportunity.
“If you connect two grids whose peak moments are at two different times, you create an ability for the grids to lean on one another,” said Grid United CEO Michael Skelly. In practice, that means less redundant generation capacity sitting idle somewhere on the grid — a meaningful efficiency gain at scale, according to Canary Media.
Federal backing that survived an administration change
In 2024, the Department of Energy awarded a $700 million grant to the project consortium, which includes Grid United and the Montana Department of Commerce as the lead administering agency. That funding came under the Biden administration. The project has continued to advance under the Trump administration, which published a final environmental impact statement for the line even as it clawed back or delayed other clean energy grants.
That continued support is notable given what happened to comparable projects. The Trump administration terminated a $4.9 billion DOE loan for the Grain Belt Express, another large HVDC project, and the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office — the office that issued the North Plains Connector grant — was later disbanded. Yet the project has moved forward.
For utilities weighing financial commitments, federal backing changes the calculus considerably. It lowers early-stage risk enough to make conditional participation viable. As Skelly put it, regulators want their states to get a fair share of the benefits — and they want customers to know they won’t be left paying for the whole thing.
A growing coalition of utilities — some far from the line itself
The consortium now includes utilities from Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington, alongside those directly operating in Montana and North Dakota. Minnkota Power Cooperative and NorthWestern Energy are the local partners. Portland General Electric and Puget Sound Energy — hundreds of miles from the line’s endpoints — have also made conditional commitments.
That might seem counterintuitive. Why would a Pacific Northwest utility pay for infrastructure in the Northern Plains?
The answer lies in how HVDC interconnections actually work. “The most reliable and resilient system will have diversity in generation supply, both in terms of types of generation and location,” said Gretchen Kershaw, chief operating officer at Grid Strategies and a former senior adviser at the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office. Distant utilities don’t need to draw power directly from the line’s terminals. They benefit because the interconnection makes the broader regional system larger and more flexible — able to absorb weather disruptions at one end using generation from the other. The scenario utilities cite most often: importing solar from California into the Upper Midwest during a winter storm.
The road ahead: permits, landowners, and a decade of precedent
Before any construction begins, Grid United must secure agreements with landowners along the line’s path, obtain state and local permits, and win final regulatory approvals in both Montana and North Dakota. None of that is quick or guaranteed.
The history of large transmission projects is sobering. SunZia, running from New Mexico to California, and the Champlain Hudson Power Express, connecting Canada to New York City, each took more than a decade from conception to completion. Skelly’s previous company, Clean Line Energy Partners, shut down in 2019 without completing any of the five transmission lines it had pursued.
The North Plains Connector’s earliest realistic completion date is 2032. If it gets there, Skelly expects it to operate for 30 years — well into an energy landscape that no one can fully map today. What’s worth watching now is whether the coalition holds, whether landowner negotiations proceed without major disruption, and whether state regulators in Montana and North Dakota ultimately see enough benefit to approve the final terms. Those decisions, more than any federal grant, will determine whether this line gets built.
Carlos is an engineer with strong expertise in technical and industrial topics. He previously worked at international companies such as Siemens and is multilingual.
