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An explosion in proposed clean energy ventures has overwhelmed the system for connecting new power sources to homes and businesses.
Plans to install 3,000 acres of solar panels in Kentucky and Virginia are delayed for years. Wind farms in Minnesota and North Dakota have been abruptly canceled. And programs to encourage Massachusetts and Maine residents to adopt solar power are faltering.
The energy transition poised for takeoff in the United States amid record investment in wind, solar and other low-carbon technologies is facing a serious obstacle: The volume of projects has overwhelmed the nation’s antiquated systems to connect new sources of electricity to homes and businesses.
So many projects are trying to squeeze through the approval process that delays can drag on for years, leaving some developers to throw up their hands and walk away.
More than 8,100 energy projects — the vast majority of them wind, solar and batteries — were waiting for permission to connect to electric grids at the end of 2021, up from 5,600 the year before, jamming the system known as interconnection.
That’s the process by which electricity generated by wind turbines or solar arrays is added to the grid — the network of power lines and transformers that moves electricity from the spot where it is created to cities and factories. There is no single grid; the United States has dozens of electric networks, each overseen by a different authority.
PJM Interconnection, which operates the nation’s largest regional grid, stretching from Illinois to New Jersey, has been so inundated by connection requests that last year it announced a freeze on new applications until 2026, so that it can work through a backlog of thousands of proposals, mostly for renewable energy.
It now takes roughly four years, on average, for developers to get approval, double the time it took a decade ago.
And when companies finally get their projects reviewed, they often face another hurdle: the local grid is at capacity, and they are required to spend much more than they planned for new transmission lines and other upgrades.
Many give up. Fewer than one-fifth of solar and wind proposals actually make it through the so-called interconnection queue, according to research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“From our perspective, the interconnection process has become the No. 1 project killer,” said Piper Miller, vice president of market development at Pine Gate Renewables, a major solar power and battery developer.
A building that formerly housed transformers at the Brayton Point Power Station, a decommissioned coal plant that is being repurposed to link a wind farm to the Massachusetts power grid.Simon Simard for The New York Times
After years of breakneck growth, large-scale solar, wind and battery installations in the United States fell 16 percent in 2022, according to the American Clean Power Association, a trade group. It blamed supply chain problems but also lengthy delays connecting projects to the grid.
Electricity production generates roughly one-quarter of the greenhouse gases produced by the United States; cleaning it up is key to President Biden’s plan to fight global warming. The landmark climate bill he signed last year provides $370 billion in subsidies to help make low-carbon energy technologies — like wind, solar, nuclear or batteries — cheaper than fossil fuels.
But the law does little to address many practical barriers to building clean energy projects, such as permitting holdups, local opposition or transmission constraints. Unless those obstacles get resolved, experts say, there’s a risk that billions in federal subsidies won’t translate into the deep emissions cuts envisioned by lawmakers.
“It doesn’t matter how cheap the clean energy is,” said Spencer Nelson, managing director of research at ClearPath Foundation, an energy-focused nonprofit. “If developers can’t get through the interconnection process quickly enough and get enough steel in the ground, we won’t hit our climate change goals.”
Waiting in line for years
In the largest grids, such as those in the Midwest or Mid-Atlantic, a regional operator manages the byzantine flow of electricity from hundreds of different power plants through thousands of miles of transmission lines and into millions of homes.
Before a developer can build a power plant, the local grid operator must make sure the project won’t cause disruptions — if, for instance, existing power lines get more electricity than they can handle, they could overheat and fail. After conducting a detailed study, the grid operator might require upgrades, such as a line connecting the new plant to a nearby substation. The developer usually bears this cost. Then the operator moves on to study the next project in the queue.
This process was fairly routine when energy companies were building a few large coal or gas plants each year. But it has broken down as the number of wind, solar and battery projects has risen sharply over the past decade, driven by falling costs, state clean-energy mandates and, now, hefty federal subsidies.
“The biggest challenge is just the sheer volume of projects,” said Ken Seiler, who leads system planning at PJM Interconnection. “There are only so many power engineers out there who can do the sophisticated studies we need to do to ensure the system stays reliable, and everyone else is trying to hire them, too.”
The climate bill President Biden signed last year provides $370 billion in subsidies for low-carbon technologies like wind, solar, nuclear and batteries.Kenny Holston for The New York Times
PJM, the grid operator, now has 2,700 energy projects under study — mostly wind, solar and batteries — a number that has tripled in just three years. Wait times can now reach four years or more, which prompted PJM last year to pause new reviews and overhaul its processes.
Delays can upend the business models of renewable energy developers. As time ticks by, rising materials costs can erode a project’s viability. Options to buy land expire. Potential customers lose interest.
Two years ago, Silicon Ranch, a solar power developer, applied to PJM for permission to connect three 100-megawatt solar projects in Kentucky and Virginia, enough to power tens of thousands of homes. The company, which often pairs its solar arrays with sheep grazing, had negotiated purchase options with local landowners for thousands of acres of farmland.
Today, that land is sitting empty. Silicon Ranch hasn’t received feedback from PJM and now estimates it may not be able to bring those solar farms online until 2028 or 2029. That creates headaches: The company may have to decide whether to buy the land before it even knows whether its solar arrays will be approved.
“It’s frustrating,” said Reagan Farr, the chief executive of Silicon Ranch. “We always talk about how important it is for our industry to establish trust and credibility with local communities. But if you come in and say you’re going to invest, and then nothing happens for years, it’s not an optimal situation.”
PJM soon plans to speed up its queues — for instance, by studying projects in clusters rather than one at a time — but needs to clear its backlog first.
‘Imagine if we paid for highways this way’
A potentially bigger problem for solar and wind is that, in many places around the country, the local grid is clogged, unable to absorb more power.
That means if a developer wants to build a new wind farm, it might have to pay not just for a simple connecting line, but also for deeper grid upgrades elsewhere. One planned wind farm in North Dakota, for example, was asked to pay for multimillion-dollar upgrades to transmission lines hundreds of miles away in Nebraska and Missouri.
These costs can be unpredictable. In 2018, EDP North America, a renewable energy developer, proposed a 100-megawatt wind farm in southwestern Minnesota, estimating it would have to spend $10 million connecting to the grid. But after the grid operator completed its analysis, EDP learned the upgrades would cost $80 million. It canceled the project.
A solar battery energy storage site in the Bronx, part of a test program to support New York’s transition to renewable energy sources.Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
That creates a new problem: When a proposed energy project drops out of the queue, the grid operator often has to redo studies for other pending projects and shift costs to other developers, which can trigger more cancellations and delays.
It also creates perverse incentives, experts said. Some developers will submit multiple proposals for wind and solar farms at different locations without intending to build them all. Instead, they hope that one of their proposals will come after another developer who has to pay for major network upgrades. The rise of this sort of speculative bidding has further jammed up the queue.
“Imagine if we paid for highways this way,” said Rob Gramlich, president of the consulting group Grid Strategies. “If a highway is fully congested, the next car that gets on has to pay for a whole lane expansion. When that driver sees the bill, they drop off. Or, if they do pay for it themselves, everyone else gets to use that infrastructure. It doesn’t make any sense.”
A better approach, Mr. Gramlich said, would be for grid operators to plan transmission upgrades that are broadly beneficial and spread the costs among a wider set of energy providers and users, rather than having individual developers fix the grid bit by bit, through a chaotic process.
There is precedent for that idea. In the 2000s, Texas officials saw that existing power lines wouldn’t be able to handle the growing number of wind turbines being built in the blustery plains of West Texas and planned billions of dollars in upgrades. Texas now leads the nation in wind power. Similarly, MISO, a grid spanning 15 states in the Midwest, recently approved $10.3 billion in new power lines, partly because officials could see that many of its states had set ambitious renewable energy goals and would need more transmission.
But this sort of proactive planning is rare, since utilities, state officials and businesses often argue fiercely over whether new lines are necessary — and who should bear the cost.
“The hardest part isn’t the engineering, it’s figuring out who’s going to pay for it,” said Aubrey Johnson, vice president of system planning at MISO.
Wind turbines in North Dakota, where some developers have canceled projects after facing rising costs to connect to the grid.Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times
The fate of these rules is unclear, however. In December, Richard Glick, the former regulatory commission chairman who spearheaded both reforms, stepped down after clashing with Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, over unrelated policies around natural gas pipelines. The commission is now split between two Democrats and two Republicans; any new reforms need majority approval.
If the United States can’t fix its grid problems, it could struggle to tackle climate change. Researchers at the Princeton-led REPEAT project recently estimated that new federal subsidies for clean energy could cut electricity emissions in half by 2030. But that assumes transmission capacity expands twice as fast over the next decade. If that doesn’t happen, the researchers found, emissions could actually increase as solar and wind get stymied and existing gas and coal plants run more often to power electric cars.
Massachusetts and Maine offer a warning, said David Gahl, executive director of the Solar and Storage Industries Institute. In both states, lawmakers offered hefty incentives for small-scale solar installations. Investors poured money in, but within months, grid managers were overwhelmed, delaying hundreds of projects.
“There’s a lesson there,” Mr. Gahl said. “You can pass big, ambitious climate laws, but if you don’t pay attention to details like interconnection rules, you can quickly run into trouble.”
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Service technicians work to install the foundation for a transmission tower at the CenterPoint Energy power plant on June 10, 2022 in Houston, Texas.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images News | Getty Images
This story is part of CNBC's "Transmission Troubles" series, an inside look at why the aging electrical grid in the U.S. is struggling to keep up, how it's being improved, and why it's so vital to fighting climate change. See also Part 1, "Why America’s outdated energy grid is a climate problem."
Building new transmission lines in the United States is like herding cats. Unless that process can be fundamentally improved, the nation will have a hard time meeting its climate goals.
The transmission system in the U.S. is old, doesn't go where an energy grid powered by clean energy sources needs to go, and isn't being built fast enough to meet projected demand increases.
Building new transmission lines in the U.S. takes so long — if they are built at all — that electrical transmission has become a roadblock for deploying clean energy.
"Right now, over 1,000 gigawatts worth of potential clean energy projects are waiting for approval — about the current size of the entire U.S. grid — and the primary reason for the bottleneck is the lack of transmission," Bill Gates wrote in a recent blog post about transmission lines.
The stakes are high.
From 2013 to 2020, transmission lines have expanded at only about 1% per year. To achieve the full impact of the historic Inflation Reduction Act, that pace must more than double to an average of 2.3% per year, according to a Princeton University report led by professor Jesse Jenkins, who is a macro-scale energy systems engineer.
Herding cats with competing interests
Building new transmission lines requires countless stakeholders to come together and hash out a compromise about where a line will run and who will pay for it.
There are 3,150 utility companies in the country, the U.S. Energy Information Administration told CNBC, and for transmission lines to be constructed, each of the affected utilities, their respective regulators, and the landowners who will host a line have to agree where the line will go and how to pay for it, according to their own respective rules.
Aubrey Johnson, a vice president of system planning for the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), one of seven regional planning agencies in the U.S., compared his work to making a patchwork quilt from pieces of cloth.
"We are patching and connecting all these different pieces, all of these different utilities, all of these different load-serving entities, and really trying to look at what works best for the greatest good and trying to figure out how to resolve the most issues for the most amount of people," Johnson told CNBC.
What's more, the parties at the negotiating table can have competing interests. For example, an environmental group is likely to disagree with stakeholders who advocate for more power generation from a fossil-fuel-based source. And a transmission-first or transmission-only company involved is going to benefit more than a company whose main business is power generation, potentially putting the parties at odds with each other.
The system really flounders when a line would span a long distance, running across multiple states.
States "look at each other and say: 'Well, you pay for it. No, you pay for it.' So, that's kind of where we get stuck most of the time," Rob Gramlich, the founder of transmission policy group Grid Strategies, told CNBC.
"The industry grew up as hundreds of utilities serving small geographic areas," Gramlich told CNBC. "The regulatory structure was not set up for lines that cross 10 or more utility service territories. It's like we have municipal governments trying to fund an interstate highway."
This type of headache and bureaucratic consternation often prevent utilities or other energy organizations from even proposing new lines.
"More often than not, there's just not anybody proposing the line. And nobody planned it. Because energy companies know that there's not a functioning way really to recover the costs," Gramlich told CNBC.
Electrical transmission towers during a heatwave in Vallejo, California, US, on Sunday, Sept. 4, 2022. Blisteringly hot temperatures and a rash of wildfires are posing a twin threat to California's power grid as a heat wave smothering the region peaks in the days ahead. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Who benefits, who pays?
Energy companies that build new transmission lines need to get a return on their investment, explains James McCalley, an electrical engineering professor at Iowa State University. "They have got to get paid for what they just did, in some way, otherwise it doesn't make sense for them to do it."
Ultimately, an energy organization — a utility, cooperative, or transmission-only company — will pass the cost of a new transmission line on to the electricity customers who benefit.
"One principle that has been imposed on most of the cost allocation mechanisms for transmission has been, to the extent that we can identify beneficiaries, beneficiaries pay," McCalley said. "Someone that benefits from a more frequent transmission line will pay more than someone who benefits less from a transmission line."
But the mechanisms for recovering those costs varies regionally and on the relative size of the transmission line.
Regional transmission organizations, like MISO, can oversee the process in certain cases but often get bogged down in internal debates. "They have oddly shaped footprints and they have trouble reaching decisions internally over who should pay and who benefits," said Gramlich.
The longer the line, the more problematic the planning becomes. "Sometimes its three, five, 10 or more utility territories that are crossed by needed long-distance high-capacity lines. We don't have a well-functioning system to determine who benefits and assign costs," Gramlich told CNBC. (Here is a map showing the region-by-region planning entities.)
Johnson from MISO says there's been some incremental improvement in getting new lines approved. Currently, the regional organization has approved a $10.3 billion plan to build 18 new transmission projects. Those projects should take seven to nine years instead of the 10 to 12 that is historically required, Johnson told CNBC.
"Everybody's becoming more cognizant of permitting and the impact of permitting and how to do that and more efficiently," he said.
There's also been some incremental federal action on transmission lines. There was about $5 billion for transmission-line construction in the IRA, but that's not nearly enough, said Gramlich, who called that sum "kind of peanuts."
The U.S. Department of Energy has a "Building a Better Grid" initiative that was included in President Joe Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and is intended to promote collaboration and investment in the nation's grid.
In April, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a notice of proposed new rule, named RM21-17, which aims to address transmission-planning and cost-allocation problems. The rule, if it gets passed, is "potentially very strong," Gramlich told CNBC, because it would force every transmission-owning utility to engage in regional planning. That is if there aren't too many loopholes that utilities could use to undermine the spirit of the rule.
What success looks like
Gramlich does point to a couple of transmission success stories: The Ten West Link, a new 500-kilovolt high-voltage transmission line that will connect Southern California with solar-rich central Arizona, and the $10.3 billion Long Range Transmission Planning project that involves 18 projects running throughout the MISO Midwestern region.
"Those are, unfortunately, more the exception than the rule, but they are good examples of what we need to do everywhere," Gramlich told CNBC.
This map shows the 18 transmission projects that make up the $10.3 billion Long Range Transmission Planning project approved by MISO.
Map courtesy MISO
In Minnesota, the nonprofit electricity cooperative Great River Energy is charged with making sure 1.3 million people have reliable access to energy now and in the future, according to vice president and chief transmission officer Priti Patel.
"We know that there's an energy transition happening in Minnesota," Patel told CNBC. In the last five years, two of the region's largest coal plants have been sold or retired and the region is getting more of its energy from wind than ever before, Patel said.
Great River Energy serves some of the poorest counties in the state, so keeping energy costs low is a primary objective.
"For our members, their north star is reliability and affordability," Patel told CNBC.
An representative of the Northland Reliability Project, which Minnesota Power and Great River Energy are working together to build, is speaking with community members at an open house about the project and why it is important.
It's one of the segments of the $10.3 billion investment that MISO approved in July, all of which are slated to be in service before 2030. Getting to that plan involved more than 200 meetings, according to MISO.
The benefit of the project is expected to yield at least 2.6 and as much as 3.8 times the project costs, or a delivered value between $23 billion and $52 billion. Those benefits are calculated over a 20-to-40-year time period and take into account a number of construction inputs including avoided capital cost allocations, fuel savings, decarbonization and risk reduction.
The cost will eventually be borne by energy users living in the MISO Midwest subregion based on usage utility's retail rate arrangement with their respective state regulator. MISO estimates that consumers in its footprint will pay an average of just over $2 per megawatt hour of energy delivered for 20 years.
But there is still a long process ahead. Once a project is approved by the regional planning authority — in this case MISO — and the two endpoints for the transmission project are decided, then Great River Energy is responsible for obtaining all of the land use permits necessary to build the line.
"MISO is not going to be able to know for certain what Minnesota communities are going to want or not want," Patel told CNBC. "And that gives the electric cooperative the opportunity to have some flexibility in the route between those two endpoints."
For Great River Energy, a critical component of engaging with the local community is hosting open houses where members of the public who live along the proposed route meet with project leaders to ask questions.
For this project, Great River Energy specifically planned the route of the transmission to run along a previously existing corridors as much as possible to minimize landowner disputes. But it's always a delicate subject.
A map of the Northland Reliability Project, which is one of 18 regional transmission projects approved by MISO, the regional regulation agency. It's estimated to cost $970 million.
Map courtesy Great River Energy
"Going through communities with transmission, landowner property is something that is very sensitive," Patel told CNBC. "We want to make sure we understand what the challenges may be, and that we have direct one-on-one communications so that we can avert any problems in the future."
At times, landowners give an absolute "no." In others, money talks: the Great River Energy cooperative can pay a landowner whose property the line is going through a one-time "easement payment," which will vary based on the land involved.
"A lot of times, we're able to successfully — at least in the past — successfully get through landowner property," Patel said. And that's due to the work of the Great River Energy employees in the permitting, siting and land rights department.
"We have individuals that are very familiar with our service territory, with our communities, with local governmental units, and state governmental units and agencies and work collaboratively to solve problems when we have to site our infrastructure."
Engaging with all members of the community is a necessary part of any successful transmission line build-out, Patel and Johnson stressed.
At the end of January, MISO held a three-hour workshop to kick off the planning for its next tranche of transmission investments.
"There were 377 people in the workshop for the better part of three hours," MISO's Johnson told CNBC. Environmental groups, industry groups, and government representatives from all levels showed up and MISO energy planners worked to try to balance competing demands.
"And it's our challenge to hear all of their voices, and to ultimately try to figure out how to make it all come together," Johnson said.
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US car-buyers love their trucks and SUVs, but they don't love the prices of electric ones.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The average new EV sells for over $61,000 in the US, locking many buyers out of the market.
Cheap-ish EVs are slowly rolling out.
But Americans love SUVs and trucks, and they're going to have to pay for them in the near term.
Americans tend to think a bigger car is a better car.
The most popular vehicle segments in the US are SUVs and pickup trucks. The Ford F-Series has been the country's top-selling vehicle for more than 40 years — followed last year by the Chevrolet Silverado, Ram pickup lineup, and Toyota RAV4.
So given that a large vehicle is what a good portion of the US population is looking for, it's no surprise that rule applies to electric vehicles, too.
It's one reason EV adoption has only been creeping up in the US, barely hitting almost 6% in 2022.
A lot of prospective EV buyers just haven't yet found the types of EVs they're looking for. They don't necessarily need more luxury electric sedans — they want the trucks and SUVs they're used to.
"Up until recently, we really didn't have much optionality in that from an EV perspective," Steve Patton, EY America's mobility sector leader, told Insider.
"It's no surprise and no coincidence that most of the new models being introduced or planned to be introduced over the coming months are around that segment because that's what we as US consumers want to purchase."
A recent study found most car-buyers don't want to spend more than $50,000 to go EV, but they also want electric trucks and SUVs that inherently cost more.Tim Levin/Insider
Bigger batteries mean more expensive cars
That model availability compounds EV cost. The average new EV sold for $61,448 in December, Kelley Blue Book estimates.
And yet, a recent Deloitte study found that 70% of US car buyers won't spend more than $50,000 to go electric.
Bigger vehicles are often just more expensive, largely because they require bigger batteries — the most expensive part of these new EVs. Popular EVs today include the high-end electric $100,000 GMC Hummer pickup, $75,000 Rivian R1T, and nearly $62,000 Cadillac Lyriq.
There are more affordable EVs available, but it might mean car-buyers have to sacrifice which segment they want.Chevrolet
What a car buyer could look for
Those wanting a cheaper EV may want to look at less expensive models like the $27,800 Chevrolet Bolt and the similarly-priced Nissan Leaf. That might require some sacrificing, though.
In the long run, EVs are generally creeping down in price, and more affordable SUVs are starting to come into play. The Volkswagen ID.4 and Kia Niro SUVs go for just under $40,000 each. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Toyota bZ4X SUVs are at about $41,000 and $42,000, respectively.
"For this segment to be more than just a niche, it has to get more affordable, but it also has to operate across multiple vehicle types," said Stephen Beck, managing partner of consultancy cg42. "That's happening, and that leads to a competitive environment that's a lot more dynamic."
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Norwegian electric car owners have a word for the way they feel when they look nervously at their battery indicators while driving in subfreezing weather: "rekkevideangst", or "range anxiety".
Tesla owner Philip Benassi has experienced it on cold winter days, but like other Norwegians, he has learned to cope with it.
With temperatures often falling below zero, rugged terrain and long stretches of remote roads, Norway may not seem like the most ideal place to drive an electric car, whose battery dies faster in cold weather.
Yet the country is the undisputed world champion when it comes to the zero-emission vehicles.
A record four out of five new autos sold in Norway last year were electric, in a major oil-producing country that aims to end the sale of new fossil fuel cars by 2025 -- a decade ahead of the European Union's planned ban.
By comparison, electric cars accounted for 12.1 percent of new car sales in the EU in 2022, up from 9.1 percent a year earlier, according to data published Wednesday by the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association.
Benassi took the plunge in 2018.
In his gleaming white Tesla S, the 38-year-old salesman for a cosmetics company clocks between 20,000 and 25,000 kilometres (12,400 and 15,500 miles) a year.
Like most new electric vehicle owners, he had moments of panic in the beginning when he saw the battery gauge drop quickly, with the prospect of it falling to zero on a deserted country road.
"I didn't know the car well enough. But after all these years, I have a pretty good idea of how many kilowatts it needs and I know that it varies a lot depending on whether the car has spent the night outdoors or in a garage," he told AFP.
The car uses much more battery when it is parked outside in temperatures that can reach minus 15 degrees Celsius (five degrees Fahrenheit), Benassi said.
"It takes quite a while for it to go back to normal consumption," he added.
In the cold season, how much range electric cars lose depends on the model and how low the temperature gets.
"But the following rules of thumb apply: a frost of around minus 10C will reduce the operating range by around a third compared to summer weather, and a severe one (minus 20C or more) by up to half," said Finnish consultant Vesa Linja-aho.
"By storing the car in a warm garage, this phenomenon can be mitigated somewhat," he added.
- Charging stations -
Drivers must plan their routes before long journeys, but car applications and Norway's vast network of more than 5,600 fast and superfast charging stations help make the process easier.
Electric cars accounted for 54 percent of new car registrations last year in Finnmark, Norway's northernmost region in the Arctic where the mercury has at times fallen to minus 51C -- a sign that the cold issue is not insurmountable.
Other Nordic countries that regularly experience chilly temperatures also top world rankings for electric vehicles -- they accounted for around 33 percent of new car sales in Sweden and Iceland in 2022.
"Now more and more new electric cars have systems for pre-heating the batteries, which is very smart because you get more range and because if your car is heated before you charge, it will also charge faster," said Christina Bu, head of the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association.
Electric car owners are not the only ones who have to worry about the cold.
"Actually, if it's very, very cold -- freezing temperatures -- sometimes diesel engine cars can't start and an electric car starts," she said.
- 'Everyone can do it' -
Norwegians are clearly sold: more than 20 percent of cars on Norway's roads are now electric -- and green, with the electricity they consume generated almost exclusively by hydro power.
Norway's longstanding policy of tax rebates for electric cars has facilitated the transition, although the government has begun to roll back some of the incentives to make up for a budget shortfall estimated at nearly 40 billion kroner ($4 billion) last year.
There is "a simple answer to why we have this success in Norway and that's green taxes", Bu said.
"We tax what we don't want, namely fossil fuel cars, and we promote what we do want, electric cars. It's as simple as that," she said.
"If Norway can do this, everyone else can do it as well."
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