A group of transmission facilities that could be built on a "no regrets" basis: This is one of the things the government will look for from the planning efforts it is going to fund after examining groups' applications for federal stimulus money. Seeking "a common chord somewhere" is how Department of Energy senior adviser David Meyer described it this week at Platts' Transmission Planning & Development Forum.
But he also reminded people that DOE's funding for interconnection-wide planning groups is just a beginning. "I certainly hope that we all understand" that, he said. "The assumption here is that iterative long-term interconnection-level analyses are going to be needed as far as we can see in terms of our professional lifetimes." And that's likely to apply whether one's professional life has only a few years to go or is just in its adolescence. Unless something volcanic happens.
The $60 million available for interconnection-wide planning work is to get at a broadly, though hardly universally held goal: tying regions together with lines meant to bring massive amounts of renewable power to load centers. It's a drop in the bucket -- though it promises to pay for a ton of airplane flights, meeting rooms and data crunches. And it's only a piece of the puzzle. Line siting is another, and also a tough one.
The still tougher part, underlying everything, sometimes unspoken, is the question of who pays.
"We all know how to do planning," PJM's vice president of planning, Steve Herling, said at the conference. The challenge is elsewhere, he said: "To get people to buy in, they need to know what they are going to pay for," reports our colleague Jason Fordney. Herling called for "a good set of cost allocation rules."
Congress doesn't want to dictate cost allocation. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission doesn't want to, either. It's a minefield. The West and Texas may be able to deal better with challenges. But the East has no common structure and a history together that sometimes seems more linked to the Civil War than to anything more recent. Probably the main thing that prompted an interconnection-wide collaborative to form last spring was a desire on the part of many -- not all -- to keep FERC out of the planning leadership role.
"We can do it ourselves," many utility transmission owners and state regulators say. They can also figure out cost allocation, and line siting. The fact that they are able to do those things only sometimes, and after long wrangles -- at FERC as well as in courts -- bodes less than stellarly.
Whether the interconnection-wide efforts bear the kind of fruit that many policymakers want is impossible to predict. But whether, if they did not succeed, policymakers would be able to mandate federal control of the issues is a big, big question mark. So what is to motivate the groups, really? If they hold out long enough, it's possible the present administration will have come and gone, and the priorities will shift ... and the earnest meetings, reports, conferences and hearings will have succeeded in keeping control where many want it: with integrated utilities and their regulators. Whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing is completely up to whoever's talking.
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