"[B]rave actions and strong leadership have often succeeded in overcoming seemingly impossible barriers."
Indeed they have. We must be talking about something deep: conquering disease, rescuing damsels, overthrowing despots. But no; it's "de-carbonizing the power system," and more specifically, getting transmission built to modernize the grid and allow creation of a clean-energy future.
The words are in a report that actually serves as something of a primer for the multitude of legal, regulatory, financial and other issues that keep transmission policy and investment in a bog. Chi-Yen Yang at Duke University's Climate Change Policy Center notes in the paper that existing law provides for regional collaboration to plan transmission as well as money to build it. But "convoluted sociopolitical and institutional obstacles" have blocked system modernization and continue to do so.
"Certainty and predictability are the secrets to capital formation," Yang says, "and they are hindered by the barriers of balkanized ownership, fragmented regulatory authorities, difficult siting processes and nearsighted planning." Not much to argue with, his characterization is another instance of putting the situation in a nice nutshell. Whether it's a permanent situation -- hard to know.
Reducing ownership fragmentation is one policy option to address the barriers, he suggests. And since restructuring ownership of transmission may be impossible (the idea of requiring it could never get past first base in the US), he lists ways to reduce the fragmentation's effects: Allow real estate investment trusts for transmission; consolidate transmission assets owned by various government entities; streamline siting processes; encourage interstate siting compacts; allow abandoned-plant cost recovery; expand federal siting authority; and more.
Reducing the need for new transmission is a good idea, too, Yang notes. And here the smart grid could help a lot ... but oh, wait, there it is again: "The fragmented structure of the utility industry and lack of federal authority in the United States may make the standardization and system integration slow and costly."
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