By Steve Blankinship, Associate Editor
A major issue within the renewable energy industry cuts to the heart of where renewables will be a decade or two from now. It’s an old subject almost preordained to become a tipping point since the first wind turbines started spinning in California’s Altamont Pass 30 years ago.
The issue is how to make renewables from the grid available to all utility customers nationwide at a competitive price. That only happens through some form of national grid configured and regulated much differently from the grid that has evolved over the past century.
Panelists at the Renewable Energy World conference in Las Vegas warned against underestimating the difficulty of siting new transmission, a key element in exploiting renewable resources. At present, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) can intervene in siting only if a state rejects a transmission project within an existing right of way. Talk is underway in Washington to allow the federal government to overrule state transmission decisions, using its eminent domain powers.
Don’t Mess With Texas (or Southern)
Imagine the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, an island grid designed to minimize federal intervention, acquiescing to such federal authority. Or imagine Southern Company deciding it has always wanted the feds telling it how to serve native customers.
The forces in play are the laws of economics and physics. The United States in not Norway, Denmark or the UK, where national grids make sense. This country is a very big place where a highly reliable, efficient and economical power infrastructure has evolved beginning in the early 1900s and proceeding through the rural electrification days of the 1930s, the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act of the 1940s and its repeal at the end of the 20th century.
Unlike European countries, this country stretches more than 3,000 miles east to west, taking in the often frigid plains of the Midwest and the arid deserts of the Southwest. It includes the Pacific Northwest, where abundant hydropower exists; the plains of the Midwest and West Texas, where high volumes of wind abound; and the Southeast, where hydro is limited and functional amounts of wind energy don’t exist.
But Georgia and surrounding states have an abundance of biomass that might potentially supply a significant amount of renewable energy, assuming environmentalists can ever agree on whether or not biomass is environmentally acceptable. There’s also the Northeast, where hydro and biomass afford potentially significant amounts of renewable energy.
The problem with any notion of a national grid is exacerbated because transmission efficiency drops with every mile electrons are wheeled. Maximum distance for efficient transmission over a 345 kV line varies, but 500 miles really starts to amplify the negative effects of line loss, regardless of the voltage used. Anything approaching 1,000 miles—the distance between where some of the best wind, solar and hydro exist and the places where it’s all but nonexistent—means favorable economics are significantly reduced.
Furthermore, Kentucky, which, due to its high reliance on coal enjoys some of the lowest electric prices in the nation, is not wont to ship that low-cost power to Massachusetts, should Massachusetts ever agree to take more “dirty” coal power. Electric customers in Oregon and Washington don’t care to wheel their cheap hydro down to Florida. That assumes Floridians care to swap their power from natural gas and nuclear for wind and hydropower, which—at the end of its long trip—would be anything but affordable.
Recent discussions on Capitol Hill aimed at boosting federal authority to site transmission lines showed the fight will not be based along party lines as much as upon regional differences. At a recent Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, members of both parties asked how their states would benefit. Republicans John Barasso of Wyoming and Bob Corker of Tennessee questioned the fairness of allocating costs nationwide. Giving greater power to the FERC could disrupt a system in the Pacific Northwest that already works well, said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said his state’s experience has not bred a lot of confidence in FERC. Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, termed “federal coordinated approach” an oxymoron.
James Dickenson, managing director and CEO of Jacksonville (Fla.) Electric Authority, speaking on behalf of the Large Public Power Council, said his organization has serious concerns about allocating costs interconnection-wide and about proposals to create a new system planning bureaucracy.
“Users of new transmission facilities should pay for them, said Dickenson. He said proposals for interconnection-wide cost allocation for new transmission are unnecessary and may discourage developing economical alternatives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions such as energy efficiency and on-site renewables.
Reaching agreement on all this will prove difficult at best. There’s no need to hold your breath over this one.