Washington (Platts)--16Feb2011/525 pm EST/2225 GMT

Members of the Eastern Interconnection Planning Collaborative expressed concerns Wednesday about what will happen once the government stimulus funding used to launch the group is gone in a few years.

The EIPC and a separate grid planning effort involving state regulators, the Eastern Interconnection States Planning Council, have been meeting and using $16 million in stimulus funding to inform policymakers on the cost, environmental attributes and other factors involved in transmission planning across the entire interconnection.

The stimulus funding is expected to last three years, but state regulators have been looking for answers on how to fund the effort once the stimulus money has been used, said Jon McKinney, commissioner at the West Virginia Public Service Commission. "I hope funding continues," but it will be tough to count on federal funding given federal budget concerns, said Charles Gray, executive director of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

EIPC is expected to develop eight scenarios involving different environmental rules, fossil fuel costs and other factors that would affect the economics of transmission development, and narrow them down to three that will be used to guide federal and state regulators, said Steve Whitley, president and CEO of the New York Independent System Operator.

Whitley and others spoke about EIPC and the state regulator group on the sidelines of the National Electricity Forum in Washington, noting that as new entities with a broad scope, the groups' findings will inform regulators, but will not be too specific on what plans to follow. "It is not going to result in a map, or a list of projects to build," said Douglas Nazarian, chairman of the Maryland Public Service Commission and vice president of the EISPC.

"We are taking a broad look at a variety of cases," such as use of renewable resources closer to populous areas rather than building transmission lines to carry that power long distances, and it marks the first time such planning has been done beyond the boundaries of ISOs in the Eastern Interconnction, McKinney said.

--Tom Tiernan, tom_tiernan@platts.com

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