So, we are going to push hard to dramatically increase our production of renewable electricity from wind and solar, with the most productive areas for each being the Great Plains and the Southwest, respectively. Then, to get that electricity from these sparsely-populated areas to where the power is needed we are going to build thousands of miles of transmission lines.
To build these thousands of miles of lines will require acquiring Right-of-Way, frequently over the objections of the landowners, across hundreds of thousands of acres, some of which is environmentally sensitive, some of which just means a lot to the people who own it, so we can inflict this on it:
Power lines like this impact much more than the land directly under them (which can't be used for most things, like growing trees), they also impact visually all the land that is within sight of the abominations, claw airplanes and birds out of the air (I must admit personal bias here, I was once in a UH-1 that was attacked by one when the dropout from the Acme School of Elevator Operators flying it "forgot" about a line that had been there every day of the year he had been flying at Fort Hood, and he converted the aircraft into an off-road vehicle without notice. It was not a happy conversion, nor a successful one, but I digress), fry innocent squirrels and birds and all sorts of mean, nasty, evil things.
Think about it, if you spent years escaping from city people and their citified ways and built yourself a self-sustaining homestead somewhere how would you like having one of these run over you??
Not to mention that thousands of miles of those damned things will be hugely expensive (have I mentioned that I'm not a fan??)
Okay, now look at this:
That's the Interstate Highway system, which already belongs to us and is already a blight on the landscape, that runs from everywhere we plan to generate this new energy to everywhere we want to use it, and I can tell you, based on having driven WAY over 90% of all those roads, outside of metropolitan areas almost all of it has a nice, wide, useless median strip right down the middle.
Instead of raping hundreds of thousands of acres of land and hundreds or thousands of square miles of vistas with those butt-ugly transmission lines, why can't we just stuff all those wires in a big honking pipe in the medians of Interstate highways?? Do it right and it would even add a safety barrier to keep westbound cars from meeting those going east, it could probably light several thousand miles of road with just the normal leakage and wouldn't ugly up any more of the world than we have to.
Sure, we'd likely have to run those big poles around cities, but those areas are already hopeless anyway, and those relatively few miles are nothing compared to what is planned.
Why not??