A huge problem awaits electric utilities scrambling to tap more clean power: a dearth of transmission lines to move energy from remote wind farms and solar panels to customers in cities and suburbs.
“You can build all the solar arrays or wind turbines in the world but if you don’t have the transmission lines it does you no good,” said Dan Riedinger, a spokesman for Edison Electric Institute, which represents shareholder- owned utilities.
The House passed a national renewable energy standard this month that promises to be a sticky issue for congressional negotiators trying to reconcile House and Senate energy bills this fall. Similar to the renewable portfolio standards (RPS) that more than 20 states have already passed, the House standard would require utilities to draw 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources.
But Riedinger and others say that meeting the House’s goal would require the construction of significantly more transmission lines and towers. There has been a serious under-investment in U.S. electricity transmission in the last two decades, he said, decreasing reliability and strength of the grid.
Said Rob Gramlich, policy director for the American Wind Energy Association: “There is wide recognition in the wind industry that [transmission] is our biggest long-term barrier.”
The investment in transmission has been declining for years. Between 1975 and 2000, spending on transmission projects fell $115 million a year.
But at the same time, power demand has been growing and is projected to increase about 40 percent by 2030, with peak demand increasing by 19 percent in the next decade, according to the North American Energy Reliability Council, a non-government entity that monitors grid reliability. Transmission problems contributed to the 2003 Northeastern blackout and continue to cause rolling “brown outs” — when voltage is reduced by the supplier to relieve pressure on the power system — in California.
Meanwhile, the length of high-voltage transmission expected to be added to the grid is going to increase by about 6 percent — highlighting the difficulty companies face in siting the lines and obtaining recovering costs. The cost of building new transmission is usually passed onto electricity customers and faces regulation by state utility commissions.
But money is not the only problem. Foes of transmission projects say the ugly metal towers and lines destroy the beauty of the countryside, lower property values and pose public health and environmental problems.
There is some resistance on Capitol Hill to using federal muscle to expand transmission. Some lawmakers are trying to undo a provision in the 2005 Energy Policy Act that directed the Energy Department to designate “national interest electric transmission corridors” — where lines could be extended over state and local objections to help relieve grid congestion. The issue is expected to surface during the energy bill conference next month.
Only two pieces of energy legislation — a bill from Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and an amendment by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) — were aimed at boosting transmission needed to help renewable energy projects. Neither made it into their respective chamber’s energy bills.
Disconnect
There’s no quick fix for the transmission problem. Building a wind farm takes about a year, but it takes five to seven years, on average, to build a delivery system.
It took 16 years for American Electric Power to complete a line from West Virginia to Virginia. Two years were needed to build the line, the utility needed the additional time to obtain permission from property owners and for state public utility commissions to authorize the job, said Mike Heyeck, AEP’s senior vice president of transmission.
Regardless of line congestion or the environmental benefits of renewable energy that the project might bring, Heyeck said, “a property owner looks at the tower and says, ‘Well, how does this benefit me? How does this transmission line and wind farm benefit me?'”
The catch for developers of renewable energy projects: They can’t get financing if there is no transmission line going to the project site, but utilities won’t invest in a new power line unless there is a power source in place.
For Southern California Edison, the nation’s leading purchaser of renewable power for the last 20 years, the company’s decision on a possible renewable contract is largely contingent on the availability of transmission, said Stuart Hemphill, the utility’s director of renewable and alternative power.
The utility recently received initial approval to build a $1.8 billion transmission project in connection with a 1,500-magawatt wind farm in the Tehachapi Valley north of Los Angeles. But there is perhaps 4,500 megawatts of potential wind energy that could be drawn once the transmission is built, Hemphill said.
Hemphill’s not sure if transmission problems will pose problems for the utility’s other renewable-power contracts, which have yet to come on line. All those contracts include the transmission construction lag time, he said, so a project proposed this year might have a 2010 or 2011 start date, depending on transmission- line permitting.
Transmission, he added, “taps currently untapped potential, getting sources nobody could get in the first place because they were, in essence, an island.”
Location, location, location
The push for renewable energy has forced states to seek creative solutions to transmission problems.
Texas, which generates more wind power than any other state, is moving to designate “competitive renewable energy zones” to establish corridors for transmission. The state wants to designate eight transmission corridors to move energy from turbines and other renewable power generators in the state’s central and western sections to cities in the east.
Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator have taken similar steps. Craig Cox, director for Interwest Energy Alliance, a renewable energy trade association, said renewable energy is enough incentive to spur those states to move ahead aggressively to develop transmission capacity.
“Rural communities want the development,” Cox said, “and the urban consumers want the green power.”
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