Work in progress. This page is an early draft — the full, sourced deep-dive is still being written.
- Existing corridors
- Co-locating on lines that already exist beats a new path
- Avoid the worst
- Routes that skip Temecula Creek, homes, and protected land
- It's been done
- Regulators have already forced SDG&E off a route once (Sunrise)
The idea, in brief
Under CEQA, the environmental review must analyze a reasonable range of alternative routes and the “no project” alternative — and a documented, less-damaging option can make a preferred route legally hard to approve. The most promising directions: co-locating on existing transmission corridors rather than carving a new one, and alignments that avoid Temecula Creek, residential neighborhoods, and protected land.
Watch the “co-location” framing, too: SDG&E argues its route is reasonable because it would parallel a 1930s-era 69 kV line on short wooden poles — but a 200-foot 500 kV tower is not a like-for-like addition to that corridor. [1]
Deep research to come
This page is a stub. A full treatment — the specific alternative alignments, the existing corridors that could be reused, and what CAISO and SDG&E actually studied — is coming in a later pass. The precedents already show routes can change: Sunrise Powerlink was forced off Anza-Borrego, and Chino Hills forced a built 500 kV line underground.
Go deeper
Sources
- [1]How It Works: Electric Transmission & Distribution and Protective Measures — U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER)