'Corridors' of power are finding resistance

Hal Wells / Los Angeles Times
If the Energy Department is allowed to proceed with its grid project, some of the transmission lines stand a chance of being routed through Joshua Tree National Park. Such prospects have drawn lawsuits from environmental groups.

The nation's electric grid needs beefing up, but critics say a federal plan is too big and ignores clean energy sources.

By Judy Pasternak, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- There is wide agreement that the nation needs to upgrade the aging system that delivers electricity from power plants to consumers -- a grid that is already overtaxed and facing a 43% increase in demand over the next two decades.

But opposition is growing to the way the Bush administration has interpreted Congress' instructions to improve the grid.

The Energy Department is making it easier to build high-voltage transmission lines in vast stretches of the country, but objections have been raised by environmentalists, lawmakers and states that would lose the right to veto power lines within their borders.

The 2005 Energy Policy Act gave the Energy Department the right to designate "national interest electric transmission corridors" where the federal government can step in to permit transmission towers and wires that have been rejected or delayed by states. In the corridors, the U.S. can also condemn private land along a power line route.

Now the department has set up two corridors that are actually huge swaths of territory. The western zone includes Southern California and western Arizona. The eastern zone cuts from New York to Virginia and inland across large sections of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio.

Transmission of electricity is critically congested at the core of each zone, the Energy Department said. The federal authority in the corridors is already attracting interest from utilities, including Southern California Edison.

But critics say that the zones are too large and were drawn to favor power from plants that run on fossil fuels rather than cleaner sources such as wind, solar and heat from the Earth's interior, which also will need transmission if they are to be part of the country's energy mix. The chosen contours of this plan, they say, will exacerbate global warming and pollution.

They have also cited the potential effects on farmland and natural habitats. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has listed the eastern zone as one of its "11 most endangered places" because of Civil War battlefields, stretches of the Appalachian Trail, designated historic districts and scenic rivers that could fall within power line paths.

But administration officials like to compare their initiatives to President Eisenhower's creation of the interstate highway system, and they say it will help keep energy prices down.

"The grid is the ultimate balancing act. The larger the grid is, the easier it is to balance," said Kevin Kolevar, an assistant secretary of Energy who directs the 3-year-old Office of Electricity Delivery and Reliability.

More than 157,000 miles of high-voltage wires in the U.S. shoot electricity to areas where the energy is needed. But the electrical grid as currently constituted is really four separate regional sets of wires, with few connections between them.

Additions to this infrastructure have been slow, with only 668 miles of interstate transmission built since 2000. Each state makes a separate decision on its part of the route.

Kolevar said the new zones were large to allow for flexibility in determining the sites for the lines, so that sensitive areas could be avoided. As for fossil fuels versus alternatives, the department is "generation-neutral. We really are," he said.

The crux of the problem lies with proposals for power lines that cross state borders, Kolevar said. States, he said, "can't take a confederate point of view and not consider the needs of their neighbors."

There is one escape hatch for states in the corridors, he said. When three or more states form a compact for transmission planning, the federal government will cede its authority to that regional group. "We need to see these states coming together, binding themselves to one another," he said.

Like others backing the federal zones, Kolevar cited a line running through Virginia and West Virginia that took 16 years to get approved. The national interest corridors are "a backstop" to speed up development, he said.

Southern California Edison was the first to look into taking advantage of the new backstop authority. Company representatives met with federal regulators last month about a 500,000-volt line it wants to build between the Palm Springs area and power plants near Phoenix that generate electricity using natural gas. Both ends of the line are in the Southwest Energy Corridor unveiled by the Energy Department in October.

California has approved the portion of the line within its borders, but Arizona's utility commissioners vetoed their part of the project last May because California hadn't built any new power plants of its own for decades.

One Arizona commissioner referred to the proposed line as "a 230-mile extension cord into Arizona." Another said, "I don't want Arizona to become an energy farm for California," adding that his state would get all of the pollution and none of the power.

Southern California Edison is exploring an appeal to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Commission officials said their approval would not be automatic, and they would consult with the states.

On the other end of the country, a Dominion Power executive testifying at a Virginia utility commission hearing pointedly refused to rule out going to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission if the state turned down its request to build a 65-mile 500,000-volt line through the countryside and into West Virginia and Pennsylvania. All three states are in the Mid-Atlantic Energy Corridor.

West Virginia's public service commission staff has already challenged the need for its section of the line, concluding that the regional grid operator has exaggerated the threat of blackouts by 2011.

Environmental groups have filed separate federal lawsuits against the designation of each national interest corridor. On Thursday, Virginia sued the Energy Department in the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee plans to hold hearings on transmission, and Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said he expected the corridors issue to come up.

Fifteen senators, including presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, requested the hearing. The 2005 energy act did not anticipate such large expanses of land being brought under federal control, they wrote.

The corridors were "the best thing we could think of," Bingaman said. "We're just now learning how it's going to work. We will look to see whether it's being implemented the way we intended."

But Nada Culver, senior counsel for the Wilderness Society, said the Energy Department failed to examine alternatives to a major, rapid buildup in transmission lines -- options such as building new and perhaps clean-source power plants, or plans to conserve energy. "Do you need them, or do you just want them?" she asked.

Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) agreed. "We all want a reliable grid, but let's get experts to put on the record what is needed," he said. The department also should get more public input before proceeding, Casey added: "This is pretty serious stuff and we need, at a minimum, due process."

Fifty-two of Pennsylvania's 67 counties are in the eastern national interest corridor, he said, "but there was just one public meeting, in Pittsburgh." Pittsburgh is near the state's western border.

This month, the Energy Department denied requests for new hearings on the interest zones, stating that "fair and ample opportunities" for comment had been provided.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) had a different criticism. He said his state, "the windiest in the country," should be considered a national interest area. Wind-energy resources are generally in parts of the country with few transmission lines.

U.S. to have say in power line siting

In a boost for utilities, the Southland is deemed a key energy corridor, allowing federal officials to overrule the state and condemn property.

By Janet Wilson, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

California utilities are up against a tough state deadline to obtain 20% of their power from renewable sources by 2010, which in most cases means shipping in wind, solar or geothermal energy from elsewhere.

The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday designated nearly all of Southern California, parts of Arizona and much of the northeast as "national interest" energy transmission corridors, an action that allows federal regulators to approve new high-voltage towers and lets private utilities condemn homes and land even if a state agency won't.

The action is potentially an enormous boost for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Southern California Edison Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric Co., all of which have faced fierce local opposition to proposed transmission lines that would stretch for hundreds of miles through numerous communities and counties.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, following direction from President Bush and Congress, designated six California jurisdictions in their entirety as "national interest electric transmission corridors," including Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Kern and San Diego counties.

"We're not talking about a huge new transmission tower on Wilshire Boulevard," said Mary O'Driscoll, spokeswoman for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But it's not clear how newer, fast-growing communities in the Antelope Valley or the Inland Empire would be affected. Small towns in rural areas and private land preserves around national parks could be early targets.

Kevin Kolevar, assistant secretary of the Energy Department's Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, said "critical areas of congestion" had been identified in both the southwest and the northeast by federal energy researchers, including coastal Southern California and the Inland Empire. Under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the federal energy commission will now be able, as a last resort, to designate badly needed transmission corridors between states to ensure reliable power reaches those areas, Kolevar said. The commission would act only if a state had not acted on an application by a utility within a year or had turned it down, he said.

A spokeswoman for the California Public Utilities Commission said its staff was researching the decision. But utilities and other business groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce and Edison Electric Institute, a national electric industry lobbying group, praised the announcement. Residents in rural areas expressed concern.

"If you're building a power plant, you tend to have lot of concern within one community; if you're building a transmission line you tend to have 1,000 miles of those kinds of concerns," Edison International Chief Executive John Bryson said in a recent interview. Edison is the parent company for Southern California Edison. "We're enormously fast-growing in Southern California, we serve . . . four of the 10 fastest-growing counties in the United States. So we're going to need a real big increase in supplies," he said.

Although Edison International is prepared to spend as much as $4 billion on new transmission lines in the next five years, Bryson said the utility recently suffered "a real setback in Arizona" because of the state's unwillingness to provide more power to California. Edison International was recently denied approval by Arizona regulators to build a new transmission line between an area of the state, which is covered by Tuesday's decision, and Southern California.

"We're evaluating the Arizona situation, and I think in the view of Congress this was enough of an issue, the parochialism and state balkanization, that a law was adopted . . . so that all parties can apply to FERC," Bryson said. "No one has done that yet. It's something you don't do lightly because in our case we would like to work very well with Arizona and California."

DWP Board President H. David Nahai also reacted cautiously. "The energy corridor designations released today were subject to a lengthy public process, with input from a variety of stakeholders. We are now evaluating these new designations and determining the extent to which they will facilitate the transmission of renewable energy to Los Angeles," Nahai said in a statement.

Residents in San Bernardino County's Morongo Valley have been fighting a proposal by DWP to lace huge new towers through historic Pioneertown, the setting for countless television westerns and movies, and through bucolic private land preserves pieced together between Joshua Tree National Park and the San Bernardino National Forest.

Federal energy regulators would steer clear of public parks and forests unless sister agencies allowed transmission lines, putting more pressure on private lands as possible route sites, Kolevar said.

"We've been expecting the federal preemption card to be played . . . and we're going to fight it," said Danny Sall, 59, a lifelong resident of Pioneertown whose home has been identified on DWP maps as possibly being in the route of a proposed transmission line. It is not yet known if Tuesday's decision applies to that line because it may not link up to out-of-state power.

"People live out here because they don't want the congestion and the traffic; they're interested in a different quality of life," Sall said. "Constitutionally I think we should be able to do that without some conglomerate 100 miles away coming in saying, 'Ha ha, this is for the greater good because we have more heads to count, so we're taking your land."

Earlier this year, members of Congress tried unsuccessfully to roll back the new powers of the federal commission. And some land trust groups are considering whether to file legal challenges.

But leading eminent domain attorney Gideon Kanner said there was a long established track record for governments to use eminent domain under the U.S. Constitution if it would benefit the greater good.

"This is another example of NIMBYism writ large," he said of objections by desert and forest community residents to power lines. "They want to live in pristine, wooded areas, but they want to be able to jump in their car, too, and run down to the local Starbucks and get a latte powered by electricity."

Riding the electricity superhighway

Nevada in the path of new power corridor

Las Vegas Business Press [Las Vegas, NV]
BY BOB SHEMELIGIAN

Today, a half-century after President Dwight Eisenhower created the federal interstate highway system to relieve traffic congestion, the federal government is applying Ike's solution to the nation's power grid.

Last week, the Department of Energy issued two draft National Interest Electric Corridor (NIEC) designations. It's an effort to set the utility industry on a path to modernize the nation's constrained and congested electric-power infrastructure.

Megan Barnett, a DOE spokeswoman, explains that the designation of National Corridors is a necessary first step in providing the federal government (through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) siting authority that would supplement existing state authority, in accordance with the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

In other words, if a utility is denied state approval to build a new transmission facility within the designated corridor, it could seek permission from FERC ... overriding state authorities.

The Mid-Atlantic Area National Corridor runs north-to-south from the southeast corner of New York State through eastern Pennsylvania, and along the Atlantic Seaboard toward Maryland and the District of Columbia.

WILDERNESS AT RISK?

The Southwest Area National Corridor covers practically all of Southern California, part of southwest Arizona and practically all of Clark County. This concerns local environmental officials, who question whether the corridor threatens some of the nation's last great open spaces, including the Mojave National Preserve.

"Reliability is one thing but two of the main reasons for the corridors going into Nevada are both very bad from an environmental perspective," said Launce Rake, communications director at the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.

Rake explains that much of the power that would be transmitted along beefed-up transmission lines running through the Southwest Area National Corridor would come from coal power plants proposed for White Pine County by LS Power and Sierra Pacific Resources "which would pump soot into the air over the Great Basin.

"In addition, he explained, the biggest power consumer would be the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which plans to take water from central Nevada and western Utah, a move that Rake says would defoliate a huge part of the Great Basin.

"We don't need the growth down here and we don't need environmental destruction up there," Rake complained. "Like the electricity grid itself, these issues are interconnected. Those who work for real estate developers and coal-burning, greenhouse-gas producing electric companies are working against the best interests of the American and Nevada public."

A RAVENOUS APPETITE

But DOE and utility industry officials say something must be done to update the nation's overtaxed transmission grid, to satisfy the nation's ever-increasing appetite for more and more electrical power. They point out that average American homes are nearly 50 percent larger than those built in the 1970s. The modern high-tech age of huge, flat-screen TVs and the explosive growth of computer equipment all combine to draw more and more power from the electric industry. "It's a reliability issue," Barnett said.

The North American Electric Reliability Corp., an industry self-regulatory organization, estimates demand for electrical power will increase nearly 20 percent in the next decade, but mileage of transmission lines will increase only seven percent.

"Despite increasing demand, we have (paradoxically) experienced a long period of underinvestment in power generation, power transmission and infrastructure maintenance," Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said last week, adding that the nation's power grid is becoming more susceptible to such natural disasters as hurricanes and ice storms, as well as the threat of terrorism.

CALIFORNIA, HERE IT COMES

The designation is supported to different extents by several utility groups, including the American Public Power Association.

"It is extremely difficult to site transmission lines," said Madalyn Cafruny, the association's communications director. "The APPA strongly supported the portion of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that created the designation of National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors. (We) advocated that a more streamlined, predictable siting process (which) gives the federal government limited authority to ensure the siting of interstate transmission lines is essential to achieving a more robust transmission grid.

"Public power systems own about 8 percent of the nation's high-voltage transmission lines, so many are transmission-dependent and rely upon services provided by other utilities, Cafruny explains.

Ironically, while the corridor runs though Southern Nevada, one local utility expects that power running through it to be diverted from the Silver State to California.

"It really doesn't affect us here very much," said Faye Anderson, spokeswoman for Sierra Pacific Power. "Our state has been very supportive in locating transmission lines to serve the load and benefit our customers but this is really a California issue. The DOE's report doesn't mention Nevada at all."

A GROWTH ISSUE

But Stan Johnson, tasked to manage situational awareness and infrastructure security for NERC, disagrees. "The Southwest Corridor will benefit your area as well as California," Johnson said. "This is a whole-area issue, not just California. Just look at your population growth. You're going to need more infrastructure to carry the electricity and the more capacity to transmit the power, the less it costs.

"Still, some utility officials in Nevada say a better solution to the nation's power infrastructure problems would be the improvement of transmission systems on a regional basis.

"Eisenhower started the interstate freeway program that has helped to fuel the economy of America for the past 60 years. An interstate transmission system (on a regional basis) that takes us from a system of single-lane roads would help everyone," said Delmar Leatham, general manager of Overton Power District.

Such a system would allow better access for smaller power companies, like those throughout rural Nevada, Leathem explains. "Hey, we can all drive on the interstate regardless of the car we own."