The nearly $1.9 billion project erected giant towers and built both above ground and underground cables that now run over 110 miles from Imperial Valley to San Diego’s territory. The project required 28,000 flight hours from helicopters to complete nearly 75 percent of the towers along the way (see video). The project uses both 500-kilovolt and 230-kilovolt lines, and it will initially be able to carry up to 800 MW of electricity (eventually the transmission rate should hit 1,000 MW).

San Diego Gas & Electric plans to use the Sunrise Powerlink to transport wind and solar power, such as the eight projects totaling more than 1,000 MW that are set to rise in Imperial County, the company said.

The project was a hard-won victory for the utility, which faced critics who were worried about the project’s environmental impact and skeptical that the project would really be used to move renewable energy and not mostly electricity from fossil fuel power plants. Other similar transmission line projects have been tabled and cancelled because of such concerns.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved the project in December 2008 after rejecting a proposal from an administrative law judge to deny the project. The judge argued that the utility didn’t need the transmission line, which would cause significant environmental damage, to meet the state’s renewable energy mandate then. The commission also decided against a proposal from one of its own commissioners that would’ve required San Diego Gas & Electric to put in writing that it would use Sunrise mostly for moving renewable energy.

Clean power highways

Building new transmission lines, or upgrading existing ones, has come to be viewed as a necessity as more power plants are proposed and set to rise from remote regions where there is space to accommodate large-scale projects that could produce renewable energy more cheaply than smaller ones. For California, which has an aggressive goal of getting 33 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, many of the solar farms are materializing in the eastern part of the state, in arid deserts and on former farmland.

Utilities are largely turning to these large power projects to help them meet the state mandate. But the cost of building transmission lines – and the risks involved if the lines are knocked off line by stormy weather or other natural disasters – also has promoted the idea of building solar projects closer to where the electricity will be used.

The utilities commission approved a program in 2010 to require the state’s three largest utilities to hold auctions to buy renewable energy from projects no more than 20 MW in size.  But 20MW still requires a big parcel of land, and some renewable energy proponents would like to see more solar equipment installed on commercial and residential rooftops instead. Those projects are more often kilowatt size.

Meanwhile, transmission line developers are looking at using newer technology to build projects that can carry a larger amount of renewable energy and do it more efficiently over long distances. China, which is building a lot of wind and solar farms, is where some of the world’s largest transmission projects are being built.

Photos courtesy of San Diego Gas & Electric

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That’s the gist of a new study sponsored by the WIRES NEMA trade group, and developed by Brattle Group analysts (PDF), aimed at getting Congress to do something about the country’s transmission backlog. The study says that investing in new transmission lines could “annually support” 130,000 to 250,000 full-time jobs in the clean power sector, as the necessary transmission lines would connect utility-scale clean power plants to the cities that will use the power.

President Barack Obama has called for 3,000 miles of new transmission lines to help double renewable energy capacity by 2012. A consortium of Eastern power grid operators said last year that transmission to carry wind power from the Midwest to the East could cost $80 billion over the next 15 years or so.

Beyond cost, building miles of new transmission lines across property (with various private and public owners) and across several state borders can be a regulatory nightmare. A previous NEMA report (PDF) likened transmission corridor siting to a game of “Chutes and Ladders,” complete with a flow chart that showed just how many agencies a project has to get through to be built.

Some recent history on transmission projects illustrates the point. In Texas, where lots of wind power lacks transmission to get its green power to market, utilities have had to route transmission lines around property boundaries, adding costs. In California, the $1.9 billion Sunrise Powerlink project by San Diego Gas & Electric just broke ground after five years of environmental opposition, giving little time to build the lines to carry the 300 megawatts of solar power the utility has promised to buy from projects in the Imperial Valley.

What Congress might do to make transmission lines easier to build remains to be seen. One step might be more support from the Department of Energy, which in February gave out its first loan guarantee for a $343 million transmission project linking Las Vegas and Reno.

At the federal level, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is asking for more power over siting and cost-allocation of new interstate transmission lines — a proposal opposed by some utilities. One big question is how costs should be split between everyone whose property is crossed or affected by the new lines and those regions that benefit from the power they deliver.

In the meantime, China is way ahead of the U.S. on new transmission lines, with tens of billions of dollars going into next-generation, high voltage direct current (HVDC) lines to serve as a renewable power backbone for the country.

Image courtesy of Jacashgone via Creative Commons license.

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The Department of Energy in 2005 found that overall, less and less money had been invested in the grid every year since 1975, and a report from research firm Primen, now part of EPRI Solutions, estimated that grid fluctuations and outages cost anywhere from $119 billion to $188 billion annually. On top of that, as utilities get more of their electricity from renewable projects -– which tend to be smaller than most conventional power plants –- they need more transmission lines over which to distribute it. The California Public Utilities Commission estimates that the state needs seven new transmission lines to reach its goal of getting 33 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

Yet in spite of all the agreement over, and data to support, investment in transmission, the lines are being built far more slowly than needed and at a slower pace than even renewable-energy generation is being built out. Projects in development are now expected to take years -– in some cases, decades -– to materialize. According to Bob Anderson, managing director of the Western Grid Group, it all boils down to two main issues: getting the finances lined up and getting regulatory approval.

Struggles: Financing, Permitting

Finding finances requires a business plan, and the projects often run into the following chicken-and-egg problem: Developers won’t build electricity-generation projects unless the transmission infrastructure is available, while investors won’t fund a transmission line unless they’re sure there’s enough power generation in place to make it worthwhile, said Jim Baak, director of policy for utility-scale solar at solar advocacy group Vote Solar. But while financing is by no means a small task, it can be less of an impediment –- in some cases -– than the regulatory process.

That involves getting permits for the entire length of the line, which often runs through multiple cities, counties, states — and in some cases also crosses national boundaries, requiring a presidential permit. Much of the objection usually comes from people who don’t want the line nearby their homes or businesses, aka NIMBY, Anderson points out.

Complicating matters is the country’s decentralized transmission planning system, which shares authority with a vast network of agencies. “There’s tension between the states and federal government and everyone gets involved,” Anderson said, adding that a dozen agencies could easily weigh in on a single project. “Landmass agencies, environmental regulators, energy regulators -– it’s just kind of a brawl.”

Getting everyone to get along is especially difficult when the various agencies don’t necessarily share common goals, but instead are looking out for their specific ratepayers, said Jim Baak, director of policy for utility-scale solar at Vote Solar. It’s tough to figure out who pays for what, who builds the transmission, how the developers will interconnect with the transmission and the timing of the electricity transfers.

Poster Child of Transmission: Path 15

How bad is it? The story of Path 15, a major power corridor that connects the northern and southern parts of California, illustrates how all these factors can impact transmission. The story starts way back in the 1980s, when California utilities realized that Path 15 was becoming congested and needed improvements to prevent outages.

The Western Energy Coordinating Council, the Transmission Agency of Northern California and the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. began studying the issue in 1988 as part of a project to build transmission between California and Oregon. The groups proposed a new 85-mile line that would connect Los Banos, Calif., and Gates, Calif., to help relieve the strain.

The first major hurdle was an environmental impact study, which concluded that the project would have no significant adverse environmental impacts. In spite of the study, the California Public Utilities Commission rejected PG&E’s proposal to build the line. The commission decided it wasn’t the most economical use of money for investors, and wouldn’t allow PG&E to recoup its investment through its ratepayers, instead suggesting other steps to help relieve the grid.

Then deregulation swept the Golden State, creating an independent system operator to manage power flows and restructuring the electricity authority in the state. When California endured rolling blackouts in 2001, a national energy policy study identified Path 15 as a trouble zone and then-U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham directed the Western Area Power Administration to build the line.

As a federal agency, Western didn’t need approval from the PUC, but also didn’t get any federal funding for the project. With PG&E, the Trans-Elect Development Co. and other partners, the project began raising private money to build the line, which was owned by Western but controlled by the California Independent System Operator.

Fundraising was difficult. Partners came and went, and six of them -– including the Transmission Agency of Northern California -– withdrew from the project. But the project managed to power on, surviving a series of supplemental environmental reviews that resulted in a change in the planned path.

Finally, in 2002, investors signed on and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and California ISO board approved the upgrade. The project was built two years later –- garnering PUC approval in the meantime –- to come online in 2004, 16 years after the initial studies had been completed. All together, the project took some 20 years from the time the idea was first conceived, Anderson said. He calls the project “a poster child” for the challenges of building new transmission lines.

Action

There’s a few things that transmission planners can do to try to speed along the process. When faced with NIMBY complaints, transmission developers need to thoroughly seek out and evaluate alternative corridors for comparison, Anderson said. They also need to be able to articulate the benefits in order to persuade the public that transmission is really necessary. And they need to convince state and federal energy regulators that the project is worth the cost to ratepayers.

But for real change to occur, it will have to be done at the political level. Politicians are starting to take notice of all the roadblocks. At the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas earlier this month, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he wouldn’t back an energy bill that doesn’t reduce the need for so many regulatory approvals and permits.

Relief may be on the way, as Congress is considering legislation that would give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission some oversight over the planning, cost allocation and rollout of transmission to help streamline the regulatory process, Baak said. “On the federal level, that’s one of the policy pieces that I think it going to really open the floodgates to transmission development,” Baak said.

Image courtesy of NREL.

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