Yehuda Gittelson Thinks the Transmission Problem Explains Everything

There’s a moment in the second episode of On The Roof where Yehuda Gittelson stops talking about his own career and starts talking about power lines. It lasts longer than you’d expect. Nearly ten minutes of a solo podcast episode devoted to the question of how electricity moves from the place where it’s generated to the place where it’s used, and what happens when there’s no good path between the two.

It’s the most animated section of the recording. Gittelson’s voice picks up speed. He circles back to the same point more than once, not because he’s repeating himself but because the point has more layers than a single pass can cover.

What he keeps returning to is a mismatch. Aroostook County has wind. It has open land. It has developers who want to build there. What it doesn’t have is a way to move large volumes of electricity south to the population centers where demand lives. That gap between where the energy is and where it needs to go has outlasted every proposal anyone has put forward to close it.

“Every conversation about clean energy eventually becomes a conversation about transmission,” Gittelson said. “People just don’t realize it until they’re already deep into the project.”

What He Saw Up There

Gittelson worked in Aroostook County before he moved to Portland. During that time, the projects his company was assessing kept running into the same wall. Wind data would come back strong. The terrain would check out. Developers would start talking to investors. And then someone would pull up the grid map, and the room would go quiet because the infrastructure needed to carry power out of The County didn’t exist, and nobody had a funded plan to build it.

He talks about this in the episode, not as a series of failed projects but as a condition. Something built into the geography and the grid architecture of northern Maine that won’t change until someone spends billions of dollars on new high-voltage lines. The King Pine project, proposed by Longroad Energy at roughly 170 turbines and up to 1,000 megawatts, is the latest attempt. ISO New England has issued its own solicitation for transmission capacity capable of handling at least 1,200 megawatts of onshore wind. Whether the money, the permits, and the political will converge this time is genuinely unclear.

Gittelson doesn’t predict. He describes what he’s seen happen before and leaves the listener to draw their own conclusions about whether this round will be different.

Why It Matters Beyond Wind

The part of the episode that surprised some listeners was Gittelson connecting the Aroostook transmission story to his current work in solar. The connection isn’t obvious at first. Residential solar operates at a completely different scale. A homeowner in Cape Elizabeth puts panels on a south-facing roof, and the electricity travels a short distance to the local distribution grid. No hundred-mile transmission line required.

But that local grid has limits too. When enough homes in a neighborhood start pushing electricity back onto the system during peak production hours, the transformers and feeder lines have to absorb it. Interconnection queues back up. Commercial solar projects, which are larger and push more power, run into capacity constraints more directly. Gittelson has watched projects sit in permitting limbo for months because the local grid couldn’t accommodate the load without upgrades.

“People think the hard part is the panels,” he said. “The hard part is what happens after the panels are up and the electricity needs somewhere to go.”

The scale is different. A residential interconnection problem gets resolved in weeks or months. A regional transmission gap takes decades. But Gittelson’s argument is that both are versions of the same question, and the question is older than any individual project or technology. Where does the power go?

Cautious Interest

Yehuda Gittelson closely tracks the development of transmission in northern Maine. The podcast gives him a professional reason to stay informed, and the personal connection to Aroostook County gives him an emotional stake he doesn’t try to hide.

He’s not optimistic exactly. He watched one version of this process stall from the inside. He’s seen the cycle of promising proposals and collapsed timelines play out more than once.

“I’d love to be wrong about it this time,” he said. “But I’m not going to assume it works until I see the wires going up.”

The episode doesn’t stay in Aroostook County. Yehuda Gittelson brings it back to Portland, to his daily work on residential rooftops, where the distance between panel and meter is measured in feet. The grid questions are smaller there. Smaller, but not absent. He’s come to believe that anyone who works in clean energy long enough ends up thinking about wires more than they ever expected to. The generation side gets the attention. The delivery side determines what actually gets built.