1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Building Integrated Grids With Inter-Regional Energy Supply Act or the BIG WIRES Act . 2. Findings Congress finds that— (1) interregional electric transmission is foundational to a modern grid and a growing economy based on affordable and abundant energy; (2) in recent decades, the interregional electric grid infrastructure of North America, and of the United States in particular, has stagnated; (3) since 2014, the total capacity of planned or newly constructed large-scale interregional transmission in North America has amounted to less than 1/3 that of South America, 1/6 that of Europe, and 1/30 that of China; (4) such a shortage of interregional transmission threatens the reliability of the electric grid of the United States and its resiliency to extreme weather events and cyber and physical attacks while artificially inflating energy prices for the people of the United States; (5) the damages resulting from that interregional transmission shortfall have been borne across the United States, in part during extreme weather events, including the 2022 freeze affecting the majority of the United States, the 2020 and 2022 heat waves in California, the 2019 heat wave and 2021 freeze in Texas, the 2018 cyclone on the East Coast, and the 2014 polar vortex in the Northeast and Midwest, and those extreme weather events collectively cost the people of the United States hundreds of billions of dollars; (6) new interregional transmission, and transfer capability achieved by means of other technologies and grid-operational practices, represents a unique opportunity to fortify the critical energy infrastructure of the United States while lowering the cost of living for families; (7) studies of interregional transmission routinely find benefit-cost ratios as high as 2.5, in line with real-world experience