Jim Sconyers jim_scon@yahoo.com 603.969.6712
Remember: Mother Nature bats last.
----- Forwarded Message ---- From: Fred Heutte phred@SUNLIGHTDATA.COM To: CONS-SPST-GLOBALWARM-CHAIRS@LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG Sent: Sunday, November 9, 2008 2:45:51 AM Subject: Re: Al Gore Group Urges Obama To Create US Power Grid | CommonDreams.org
I have said this before so let me go through the basic points once more. The yearning for a "national grid" is the triumph of slogans over substance from well-meaning people. But in addition, there is a fleet of would-be financiers, construction, utility and power marketing deep thinkers who would love to make crazy money off the difference between physical rights and financial rights for long distance transmission under the guise of a national grid. Let me explain.
Electric power transmission is effectively limited by the loss of power from resistive heating. Even at very high voltages -- 500 kilovolts (kv) and up, this means that with rare exceptions feasible transmission paths are about 800 miles or less.
The longest transmission lines in the world, such as the two AC and one DC lines forming the Pacific Intertie from the Columbia River to southern California, exist because of special conditions.
For example, the Intertie exists to accommodate "seasonal diversity exchange," where surplus spring and summer hydro from the Northwest is sent to California, and the energy is generally returned from surplus gas peaking capacity in the LA basin and other resources from this time in the winter through early spring. Planning for the Intertie was effectively in place in the late 1960s, -40- years ago.
The longest Intertie path is just short of 1000 miles. The longest transmission line in the world, Inga-Shaba in Congo, is just slightly longer at 1,050 miles. It was constructed with Eximbank finance guarantees to promote copper and cobalt production in Katanga (and thus undermine the 1970s insurgency there), as a benefit to then-Zaire president Mobutu, who may have personally skimmed tens of millions of dollars from this project alone. The story is more complicated, but suffice it to say it was never economical and with the ongoing civil war in Congo, the line is basically permanently defunct.
Very-high-voltage lines longer than about 600 to 800 miles are not feasible because they lose too much power (for AC lines) or synchronization costs too much (DC). For the AC Intertie lines, for example, power losses between the Columbia River and southern California range from 10% to 15%. When the Intertie is fully loaded (which is not very common), therefore, about 1,000 of its 8,000 megawatt capacity is lost due to resistive heating and other conditions. That's the equivalent of dropping two full-size coal, gas or hydro facilities over that distance.
The only reason to do the Intertie was the special conditions prevailing with hydro variability between the winter and the summer in the Northwest. It was and is an appropriate exception to the rule for transmission distance (although it opened the Northwest to being clobbered through no fault of its own by California's catastrophic deregulation policy and the 2000-2001 power crisis that followed).
It is absurd to think of generating solar power in Arizona or wind power in Montana and shipping it to Boston or Atlanta, which is the implicit promise of all the so-called national grid schemes. If this were tried, at least half the power would be lost over the transmission path. It isn't going to happen. Period.
Proponents then quickly change the subject and start talking about advanced transmission technology to overcome resistive heating and other technical issues. They usually refer to superconductivity (and other variants). Certainly this is a way to decrease resistive losses, but the problem is that superconductive transmission line development has been in the labs for 40 years and will be there another couple decades barring a miraculous leap.
There are other issues with a "national grid" as well, such as voltage regulation and phase synchronization, but I'll skip the details since I'm not a power engineer to begin with and there are plenty of resources on this around the Internet.
Thus, it is no surprise that no new Intertie-length transmission lines have been built in the US since the 1970s, nor will there be in any foreseeable future, much less the backbone for a "national grid." We can't do it and we don't need it, since plenty of renewables exist in -all- regions to serve those regions over much shorter distances.
Instead, I want to talk about the real motivation for the "national grid" concept, which is a combination of greed and power.
Specifically, the greed comes from Wall Street and business interests who want to create a national system of financial rights for transmission and link the regional grids together -as if- they are a unified physical entity. This ignores the reality of voltage loss and lack of physical transmission paths and costs, of course, and would create yet another electric power casino for hot money to go and yield big quick profits and create grand market distortions, as happened on a smaller geographic scale in California and the west in 2000-2001 and on a lower but chronic level in the existing regional transmission organizations today (NEISO, NYISO, PJM, MISO and CAISO), where physical rights and financial rights at least have some bearing on each other.
The current transmission policy at the federal level as promulgated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission claims to produce four results: (1) lower costs; (2) higher reliability; (3) investment in new transmission where needed; and (4) greater accountability and transparency. In reality, the RTOs do none of those. Instead, they permit utilities and marketers to make more money by selling power over longer distances while increasing congestion, raising prices and decreasing reliability, while hiding behind "stakeholder" process games. The answer to these problems is to make the RTOs more complicated. For example, the California ISO MRTU (Market Redesign and Technology Upgrade) will basically add a bunch more features to the California power pool and lots of fancy and complicated software, while putting handcuffs on renewable energy development. Naturally, it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the project is already far over budget and years late. Yet the "primitive" west coast bilateral power market just hums along as it has for 20 years, filling power and transmission needs and keeping prices at a reasonable level. (The bilateral market wasn't intended for planning, however, so that is a big gap that should be filled.)
We need real reform of federal electric transmission law. We need national standards for reliability and transmission sales that do not handcuff electric customers to a one-size-fits-all rigged market to benefit generators, transmission operators and speculators. We need to shorten the distance of physical and financial transmission deals, and we need to direct new transmission funding to where the renewable resources are, and keep the new lines away from high- impact lands and habitats.
The answer is -not- to move toward a "national grid" which will go the next step toward beyond the ill-begotten "energy corridors" of the 2005 Energy Act in completely suppressing even poorly run state siting authority. The answer is also not to give in to Southern Co. and others who want to use the existing fragmentary and weak state siting process to lock in permanent dependence on coal.
What we need is federal transmission policy reform that: (1) creates strong regional planning bodies that unlike RTOs do -not- operate transmission markets; and (2) provide national standards for reliability and environmental protection and renewable development while allowing regional flexibility.
Neither a national nor a local focus is appropriate for transmission planning: the regional level, which is the natural and economically defined limit of transmission systems, is the right level.
The "national grid" as presently envisioned will strip states of siting authority, proceed with new transmission corridors that override even federal law in some circumstances (already happened in the Energy Act of 2005), assign quasi-governmental authority, including the authority to override state jurisdiction, to private entities, the RTOs (already happened in 2005), rely on
"the market" to make decisions about investment in new transmission with no reference to studies of need and environmental value and impacts (a system that has already failed at the regional level), and make short-term power and transmission market pools supreme over other market forms (including well-functioning bilateral markets) as well as avoid the hard work needed for transmission capacity assessment, planning and siting.
In the words of my geek friends, the "national grid" poses a potential "epic fail." Unless we define "national grid" very differently than I have seen out there from any number of sources.
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