----- 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.
fh
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