Fed May Take Control Of Smart Grid Plans

WASHINGTON — Across the Great Plains the wind blows incessantly, while in the remote Nevada desert the sun bears down without relief. Each holds the potential of a vast new energy resource.

While wind turbine and solar projects are ready to capture this new, eco-friendly energy source, where are the transmission lines to get the power to where it is needed?

Democratic congressional leaders, a former president and his one-time vice president, several Obama Cabinet members, energy executives and business leaders thrashed out that very predicament at a high-profile clean energy conference on Monday.

After two hours, a consensus seemed to emerge: The outdated electricity grid must be modernized and expanded if President Barack Obama's vision of dramatically increasing the country's renewable energy resources is to be accomplished. And the federal government will have to play a bigger role in locating high-voltage power lines to overcome local and regional resistance.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., a leading participant in the gathering, said he will soon introduce legislation to give federal regulators authority to override states when it comes to locating long-distance power lines.

"We cannot let 231 state regulators hold up progress," Reid said, referring to the members of state public utility commissions that decide on transmission locations.

While states should be given every opportunity to participate, "there may come a time when the federal government will have to step in," said Reid, whose state is a prime target for entrepreneurs building solar energy projects.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also called for expansion and modernization of the nation's power transmission system, saying these improvements are "essential to all that we do" to promote renewable energy.

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The clean energy conference _ which included former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming, and former President Bill Clinton _ focused at length on the need for a national "smart" grid to transport electricity, and the need for grid expansion.

Gore said modernizing the transmission grid will allow for new ways to generate and distribute electricity.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he's ready to open federal land to renewable energy projects, including wind farms in the waters off the U.S. coast, and map out energy corridors. But, he warned, the power grid of today won't get the new energy to the markets that need it.

"In the end, unless we are able to solve this juggernaut and deal with the transmission issue we're simply going to be standing in place," Salazar told the conference, which was organized by the Center for American Progress.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that will craft energy legislation, said that while he has not seen Reid's proposal, he agreed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should have more authority for planning and locating high-voltage power lines.

Bingaman said he hopes to have a bill in four to six weeks that will address the grid issue and establish a requirement for utilities nationwide to generate a certain percentage of electricity _ as much as 20 percent by 2020 _ from renewable sources such as wind, solar and biomass.

States have fought to maintain jurisdiction over locating the power grid.

Fred Butler, a New Jersey regulator who is chairman of National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, said state officials are willing to work with the federal government on placement issues but oppose a federal takeover of the authority.

Former New York Gov. George Pataki, one of the few Republicans at the conference, said the federal government must get more involved in establishing power transmission lines.

"If you try to run a wire through someone's community, that becomes about as contentious as you get," said Pataki. If that power is going through a state, he said, "you don't have to take a poll _ no one is going to be for it."

Comments

[newshawk14]

I basically feel that government should own/control the electrical grid with any private company
able to sell or buy electrical power from the grid. This will insure genuine competition and
miracle of miracles, perhaps even lower rates. Hoping for hundreds of companies working
in consensus to make the grid effective, strikes me as a pipe dream.

[Tom95134]

Solar panels on every roof just isn't practical. Massed solar arrays is more realistic combined with solar tower generation systems. With the solar towers you get a two-for-one. They typically generate so much heat that you can use the excess for desalinization of sea water. A very large array in the Mojave would provide power and water to L.A.

[Tom95134]

Thankfully, someone has finally figured out that you can't leave this up to the individual power companies or we'll be back in the days of kerosene lamps and candles.

Maybe now there will be a chance of catching up to Europe. They already have plans on the drawing board for an energy grid based on ultra-high voltage DC transmission lines. One of the routes in planning is from a very large solar tower complex located on the north shore of Africa to central Europe where it will interface with existing AC systems. AC transmission systems just don't cutit when long distnces from generation plant to consumption point are involved. There is too much reactive losses associated with AC. If Edison and Tesla hadn't been so stubborn we might have had a much better system right fro the start. AC for local distribution and DC for long haul transmission.

[StephenBarry]

From President Obama's speech:
"But to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy."

It would be so easy to place a solar panel on every roof in America, but that would not be profitable in the long term or politically palitable in the near term. Profitability is every homeowner being required to feed the energy beast each month by paying our gas and electric bills. I anticipate centralization of solar energy in the hands of several corporate behemoths. We will merely swap oil companies for solar companies. For the public to profit and remain energy independent is capitalist blasphemy. Now THAT would be real change, but we will never realize it. Also, the process will necessarily be long and slow. Why ? They will have to figure out a way to trade solar power on the financial markets. Supply will not be impacted by geo-political events, there will be no oil wars and the sun will rise every day. No more wild gyrations in the oil price for Wall Street to salivate over. There will need to be root and branch change in the military-industrial complex, the auto industry, the utilities, dismantling the infrastructure supporting them, proping up reactionary arab monarchs, etc etc. We have had the solution for decades, we just willfully never acted. The spectre of extinction is wonderful for focusing the mind.

[wagadog]

It bears repeating!

"It would be so easy to place a solar panel on every roof in America, but that would not be profitable in the long term or politically palitable in the near term. Profitability is every homeowner being required to feed the energy beast each month by paying our gas and electric bills. I anticipate centralization of solar energy in the hands of several corporate behemoths. We will merely swap oil companies for solar companies. For the public to profit and remain energy independent is capitalist blasphemy. Now THAT would be real change..."

Write to him. Talk it up. Write to your representative, senator, the Interior Secretary, the LABOR secretary, the DOE. We need DE-centralized energy production and savings, not some big huge "smart" grid that will just make it possible for private corporations to threaten to throw the switch on us if we don't pay up.

Labor because there could be thousands of unemployed construction workers installing solar and wind systems in peoples' (saved from foreclosure) houses RIGHT NOW.

Get on MyObama and start a blog, TELL THEM, Tell them, tell them!

[mjt218]

It startles me how many people think this is nothing but a good thing. State Regulators holding up progress on right of way siting for Transmission lines, is more likely to be about questions of impact on communities and the environment than it is about corporate greed.

Believe me, energy companies wants nothing more than to get Fed backing on large cap transmission from large cap wind and solar farms to large markets like the Northeast and the West Coast. They're not going to be the ones holding things up. Consumers and regulators concerned about price impact and having transmission lines in their backyards are going to be the ones the Feds push out of the way.

[wagadog]

It's pretty clear why the energy companies want a grid: to keep us all on the line.

A better solution (and the one they're afraid of, and trying to misdirect us away from) is subsidized home solar and wind. But that's a one-time cost and literally empowers us all individually, not an ongoing excuse for some big corporation to have ongoing access to our bank accounts.

This is also why they want out of our little homesteads and herded into hi-rise yuppie shoeboxes in the middle of the road. "Smart Growth" my arse.

[PlugINCarsRule]

Just the fact that they are acknowledging the need and discussing such is HUGE! We really must get on about the business of becoming an energy independent nation. No one single factor burdens a society and economy more than the cost of fuel. Jeff Wilson has a fantastic book just out called The Manhattan Project of 2009 Energy Independence Now. It is exciting to see our nation finally starting to wake up to the seriousness of this need in our society.

[mjt218]

What does building new transmission lines have to do with Energy Independence? Last I checked, Energy Independence was about imported oil for transportation, not imported coal for electrical generation (we export more coal than we import).

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/quarterly/html/t4p01p1.pdf

It is a fallacy to claim that changing the way we generate electrical power in this country has anything to do with energy independence. Politicians and Interest Groups use this fallacy to tie energy generation issues to gasoline and thus American Pocketbooks (Al Gore does this, and I just saw a TV commercial where the Atomic Energy Institute does it).

[Solsister]

A fair amount of imported oil is used to transport the coal to the power plants. Unless you want to go back to trains running on coal instead of diesel.

[Solsister]

A lot of oil is also used to extract the coal.

[tailgateshirts]

def needs to be a Fed Project or there will be 25000 different sockets and converters needed and turn into a MASSIVE Cluster F

[dsws]

Lots of spending gets called "investment". Building the grid we need really is investment. National infrastructure like this is clearly a job for the federal government.

[wagadog]

No. Putting solar panels and wind generators and banks of batteries on every household and apartment complex is the better solution.

But it won't give a large corporation an excuse to constantly be tapping our bank accounts. Which is why the big corps are making the bid for the grid, not home solar and wind.

Think about it.

[research]

The grid is a natural for the federal governmnet to run. We've seen what happens with Enron runs it.

[mjt218]

The Enron scandal was about accounting, not designing, building and operating power transmission.

[mjt218]

The Enron scandal was about accounting, not designing, constructing and operating power transmission.

[research]

"Overscheduling is a term used in describing the manipulation of capacity available for the transportation of electricity along power lines. Power lines have a defined maximum load. Lines must be booked (or scheduled) in advance for transporting bought-and-sold quantities of electricity. "Overscheduling" means a deliberate reservation of more line usage than is actually required and can create the appearance that the power lines are congested. Overscheduling was one of the building blocks of a number of scams. For example, the Death Star group of scams played on the market rules which required the state to pay "congestion fees" to alleviate congestion on major power lines. "Congestion fees" were a variety of financial incentives aimed at ensuring power providers solved the congestion problem. But in the Death Star scenario, the congestion was entirely illusory and the congestion fees would therefore simply increase profits." wiki

A federal controlled grid would have been able to control that.

[Antifascist-08]

I watched the workshop on CSPAN. It was VERY interesting. An All Star panel. Check it out if they play it again. As good as everyone was, Clinton took it home at the end. He and Obama are on the same level. Gore, Kennedy and others were right on point. This was a watershed event. We may be witnessing a true turning point in our history.

It was brought up at the end that one obstacle in these kind of projects is jurisdictional disputes. We can only hope that this project, which is the backbone and heart of our move to a green economy, does NOT get hung up by people fighting over regulations and control.