Power line project would cut through Baltimore region’s preserved land, farms

Central Maryland residents in growing numbers are vowing to stop a proposed upgrade to the region’s energy grid involving a 500,000-volt overhead transmission line that would cut across farms, parks, neighborhoods, wetlands and forests in three counties.

The Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project would carve a 70-mile path through largely rural areas of Baltimore, Carroll and Frederick counties, in areas, opponents believe, where government land preservation programs have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over decades to purchase development rights placing land in perpetual easements.

In Carroll alone, data from the county’s Department of Planning and Land Management shows proposed power lines could affect 130 farms preserved through various county, state and federal programs. In just one potential 3-mile stretch through Hampstead, power lines could be built across 10 farms and 900 acres — all preserved land.

At one of those farms, owned for generations by members of the Lippy family, one scenario runs lines between a home built in 2008 and a 300-year old farmhouse.

“It’s our heritage,” said Heidi Lippy Sprinkle, who lives with her husband and daughters in the newer home near the old farmhouse, the birthplace of her father. “I grew up a farmer and learned to drive down the pasture where these lines are supposed to go straight through. It’s heartbreaking.”

As Maryland and much of the nation struggle to navigate a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the region’s electric grid operator says upgrades are critical to meet growing electricity demand and handle system overloads. PJM, the grid operator for 13 states and D.C., awarded a contract last year for work on the $425 million Maryland project. It’s just a fraction of the $5 billion in transmission expansion projects PJM approved in December.

PJM says growth in future energy demand — at least 5% each year through 2039 — will be driven largely by the shift to clean energy. That includes electrification of vehicles, manufacturing, data centers and other uses and accelerated closures of fossil fuel-fired power plants in Maryland and elsewhere.

“States have renewable goals … and in order to connect more renewable energy to the grid, it needs to connect to something, and that’s going to require transmission,” said Susan Buehler, a PJM spokeswoman. “You just don’t send energy to one spot, this line is going to energize all of the region, particularly in a region that is short of electricity. Reliability across the footprint at least cost is the mission.”

But opponents of the Maryland project believe the line won’t benefit those in its path, serving mostly out-of-state energy needs, such as several dozen privately owned data centers proposed in Virginia.

Any of the 10 routes proposed by PJM’s contractor could lead to loss of property through eminent domain, disruptions to livelihood and drops in property values, opponents say. Beyond that, they argue the lines would irreparably harm an important swath of Central Maryland’s rural economy, environment and history.

“Folks are bereft,” said Joanne Frederick, one of the leaders of the newly formed Stop MPRP. “It’s as destructive as a tornado going through all three counties and wiping out that amount of property. And it will similarly leave that type of scar across Maryland.”

Lippy Sprinkle fears the project would shatter Maryland agriculture.

“When you take away that many acres of farming, or you split farms or make areas that you can’t till any longer, you’re taking away from a huge industry in our state,” she said. “We don’t know how much our land use would change once the towers go up.”

Public Service Enterprise Group, a New Jersey energy company contracted by PJM, will narrow down the proposed routes to determine how to connect from an existing Baltimore Gas & Electric transmission line right of way in northern Baltimore County through Carroll County to a station in southern Frederick County.

Project managers held the first of a series of public information sessions July 11, drawing hundreds of people, many of whom said they felt blindsided by the plans. Customers across PJM territory will pay for the project, expected to be completed by 2027.

In northern Baltimore County, new lines could be installed in the Piney Run Rural Legacy Area , where an estimated 23,000 to 24,000 contiguous acres between Interstate 83 and the Carroll County line are preserved by easements. Preserved land includes forests, streams, wetlands, parks and farms that produce food for people, livestock and export, said Victoria Collins, president of the Land Preservation Trust Inc., a local land trust representing the Piney Run area. One proposed route would go through Gunpowder Falls State Park.

Collins argues that preservation has environmental benefits such as cleaner water in reservoirs and wildlife protection.

“We are one of the largest conserved areas with such close proximity to a major city,” Collins said, making space for vineyards, bicycle routes and pick-your-own produce farms. “What they’re proposing is to take a commercial enterprise and run it right through where these folks have conserved their land. Our hope is that the authorities could choose existing rights of ways.”

Ralph Robertson, a New Windsor farmer involved in Carroll County’s agricultural preservation efforts for decades, said he’s angered most by the lack of transparency about the potential unraveling of years of preservation. Robertson served on Carroll’s agricultural preservation advisory board for more than a decade while running a dairy and beef farm, then worked for the county’s agricultural preservation office, eventually as program manager. He retired in 2019.

“I’m appalled that this transmission line will be going though agriculturally protected land that the county and the state have spent millions and millions of dollars to protect,” Robertson said.

Since the county wrote its first easement in 1980, it has put more than 78,000 acres under easement, part of an effort to embrace “smart growth” by channeling new development to targeted areas and protecting the agricultural base.

Under one scenario, the power lines would run through meadowlands for cattle on about a quarter of Robertson’s 105-acre farm that also grows soybeans and corn, includes protected wetlands and has been in the family a century.

As landowners, he said, “we think we have rights that we don’t have. We think we’ve protected land that we really haven’t protected.”

PSEG has been reviewing the feedback from information sessions and a public comments page on its website, said William Smith, a spokesman. The company plans to announce a recommended route later this year, then file for a permit through a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity proceeding before Maryland’s Public Service Commission. The commission then would take recommendations during evidentiary hearings from its staff, the Office of People’s Counsel and state agencies as well as hold public hearings.

“We’re very sensitive to the concerns of the community,” Smith said. “We would encourage the public to share concerns with us.”

The Piedmont line is part of roughly $5 billion worth of transmission system expansion projects proposed by PJM to serve the 65 million electricity customers in its 13-state area.

In announcing the $5 billion transmission system expansion in December, PJM said grid upgrades are needed to prepare for significant impacts from up to 7,500 megawatts of new data centers being built in Virginia and Maryland, combined with the deactivation of more than 11,000 megawatts of power plants.

David Lapp, head of Maryland’s Office of People’s Counsel, which represents utility customers, asked PJM’s board to delay a vote of the project to give stakeholders and consumers more time to review plans he called unprecedented in scale, scope and cost, the board declined.

Pushback on the plans has come from all corners of PJM’s territory, including Loudoun County, Virginia, where a coalition of nonprofit groups, community and neighborhood associations and business organizations formed in January to oppose a new 130-mile transmission line being developed there for PJM that would connect to data centers proposed in that state.

PJM says data centers account for just part of the growing demand it must address by 2030 to maintain electric power reliability. In a long-term load forecast released in January , the grid operator said total annual energy use throughout its footprint is expected to increase nearly 40% by 2039. The forecast showed the number of electric vehicles jumping by about 30% a year.

“Rising energy demand in the region PJM serves is increasingly driven by the development of data centers throughout the PJM footprint, combined with the accelerating electrification of transportation and industry,” the forecast said.

In Maryland, part of a new high voltage line could end up 30 to 50 yards off Connor Eline’s back porch in Upperco. Eline, an owner of Eline Funeral Homes, bought the home his grandparents built in 1989, which appealed to him because the farm next door has been in preservation for two decades. Now, he and many of his neighbors worry about land protections being stripped away and property values dropping. One of his neighbors could see lines running across the front lawn of a newly built house.

“I’ve heard from many farmers, their own children or grandchildren can’t build a house on their own family’s property that’s been in the family for 200 years because they chose to put it in land preservation,” he said. “If a project like this can come in and claim eminent domain, it’s quite backwards.”

Lisa Carton, who with her husband owns Black Locust Hops Farm Brewery, a commercial hops farm and brewery, said the proposed power line would not cross their Freeland property. But that’s beside the point, she said.

She and many other nearby property owners have land in agricultural and forest buffer easements and follow strict county zoning rules.

“I cannot cut firewood from the forest that I pay taxes on,” Carton said. “I am not even allowed to move soil on that land. I cannot touch it. … The idea that the project would simply devastate those lands with bulldozers is without conscience.”

Frederick, a leader of Stop MPRP , said she began organizing residents, farmers, and land owners across the three counties after learning of the “sheer number of homes and people, and amount of land, particularly productive farmland and pristine open space that will be catastrophically impacted.”

“Our goal is clear — stop the installation of high transmission power lines through our land and communities,” she said.

The group asks those with concerns to email the Public Service Commission, which established a dedicated email address that as of Wednesday received more than 360 comments.

For Frederick, the fight is personal. One proposed route bisects her family’s 100-acre farm once owned by her great-grandparents, who were dairy farmers. The land had been placed in land preservation and forest conservation by 2020, when she bought the property back. Her grandfather was born in the house she lives in now.

But even if the routes change, she said, “this is not okay, regardless of whether it is in my yard or my neighbor’s yard or my neighbor’s neighbor’s yard. All of us are committed that this should not be in any one of our yards.”

This article has been updated to clarify that the 10 proposed transmission line routes were proposed by PJM’s contractor Public Service Enterprise Group. The Sun regrets the error.