Recently in Transmission Category

If you build it, will they come?

Tres Amigas appears to think so. If the company builds a power hub in Clovis, New Mexico, in a project announced Tuesday, generation and transmission projects would have to be built to hook into it. The three power interconnections would suddenly be Three Friends instead of living mostly parallel lives. An idea exciting enough that it could make an adventurous type want to do it just because it's never been done. Because it's there.

But a lot needs to fall into place if the 22 square miles Tres Amigas has obtained the lease rights for is to be more than a field of dreams.

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. 

"[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.

Insouciant? FERC? The 7th Circuit US Court of Appeals has said so, and it makes for a delightful picture. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as a Parisian devil-may-care, stirring in some of us a vague, sweet longing for a summer of lazy ripostes on the Left Bank.

The Chicago court didn't describe FERC as an insouciant agency, of course. But its refreshingly plain-English opinion on August 6 did apply "insouciance" to the approach FERC took to approving PJM Interconnection members' chosen method of sharing the cost of building new extra-high-voltage transmission lines.

Applying a PJM-wide pro rata cost allocation the way FERC did it is just not OK, two of the three judges said in a ruling that appears to have thrown a pall of uncertainty over transmission investment.

Jon Wellinghoff can't stop stirring the pot. Not that that's a bad thing for the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; it's just something new for the person in that job.

Last week he made waves by calling the concept of baseload power perhaps an anachronism. This week he suggested that the Texas-only power system, which is outside of FERC's jurisdiction, might do well to integrate more with the rest of the country. At least one blogger found the suggestion intriguing, but said Wellinghoff might want to be a little wilier in his approach.

Take it from Ted Turner and T. Boone Pickens: There would be nothing greater than having big transmission lines on your property.

Easy for billionaire land barons to say, maybe. But on CNN's Anderson Cooper360 the other day they seemed to have made a little Public Service Announcement encouraging landowners everywhere to take a similar view.

Commissioner Suedeen Kelly appeared to suggest yesterday that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission doesn't need any new authority, after all, to push transmission buildout. FERC has asked for much stronger permitting power and Congress is considering it; the 4th Circuit US Court of Appeals has rebuffed FERC's effort to get power to override states' denial of transmission projects (see previous post.) But Kelly said at the Deloitte Energy Conference that the commission may have enough authority already to leverage public and policymaker desires for green energy and economic development, and "the problem child of transmission might be able to be addressed."

It was possibly surprising today when the 4th Circuit US Court of Appeals said it would not rehear the decision a three-judge panel issued in February rejecting the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's interpretation of its transmission-permitting authority.

The February ruling was not unanimous, perhaps leading FERC to think there was a chance the full bench would reconsider it. But not so. The commission told our colleague Craig Cano today that FERC has not decided what to do now; it's hard to figure if an appeal to the Supreme Court is in the offing.

The Wires group today urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to be stronger and more consistent in promoting a build-out of the transmission system -- at least until Congress enacts some new, more centralized, transmission planning and siting regime. (That is if Congress is able to agree on a regime. The forces seeking more federal, or at least more regional decision-making are strong, but states and utilities wary of it are also strong.)

Wires is the Working Group for Investment in Reliable and Economic Electric Systems. In a statement today, it lamented the New York Regional Interconnect's decision earlier this month to withdraw its state application to build the 190-mile line it wants to put from upstate to downstate. NYRI's reason was FERC's refusal to change a New York Independent System Operator rule requiring 80% of system stakeholders to approve a project. Since some important stakeholders oppose the project, NYRI knew it did not have a chance.