Local Indigenous communities and environmental groups in New Mexico have challenged a proposed transmission line designed to boost power reliability and redundancy for supercomputing and other projects at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

The Electrical Power Capacity Upgrade Project plans to construct a 14-mile transmission line through the Caja del Rio area west of Santa Fe, New Mexico, providing 200MW of additional power.

However, plans to traverse the Caja del Rio plateau have drawn the ire of local communities and environmentalists who contend it will damage significant cultural and natural resources, vital biodiversity, and environments of critical importance to the adjacent Pueblo communities.

The project received over 23,000 opposition statements during its public comment period following its environmental assessment, published in December 2023. Opposition was buoyed by Santa Fe’s City Council, which in June 2022 passed a resolution supporting the long-term preservation of the Caja del Rio plateau.

Despite this, the project recently cleared one of the final stages of permitting, with the US Forest Service releasing a draft decision indicating it found “no significant impact” on the Santa Fe National Forest.

Following the draft decision, there is an objection period, after which a final decision is expected to be issued on January 1, 2025.

Objectors to the project hope to raise awareness during this period by lobbying the Forest Service to reconsider their decision and convince them to undertake a tribal-led ethnographic study.

Romir Lahiri, New Mexico associate program director for the Conservation Lands Foundation, has argued that instead of just conducting an environmental assessment, a full environmental impact statement is needed to “explore other options outside of this one path that cuts through this landscape, sacred to a lot of the tribes in the area, and also important for kind of wildlife connectivity and landscape connectivity.”

However, despite these claims, federal agencies have argued that the transmission line is necessary. According to a fact sheet, the two existing lines are likely to approach capacity at the end of 2027, threatening LANL's ability to sustain its mission.

According to the fact sheet, renewables were considered at the LANL. However, they were deemed infeasible and likely to cause more environmental damage than the transmission line.

In addition, the project claims that it has rerouted the line to avoid or minimize impact on cultural sites. The evaluation determined that the project was unable to avoid some visual and other impacts on cultural resources and the project developers are consulting with Tribes and Pueblos to develop mitigations to address these impacts.