The UD and Princeton team showed conservatively that, with some upgrades to transmission lines but without any need for added storage, the PJM grid can handle over 35 gigawatts of offshore wind—that’s 35 billion watts—enough to power an estimated 10 million homes. They also found that the PJM grid could in the future handle twice that amount, up to 70 gigawatts, as wind forecasting improves, allowing the power operator to better predict and harness more wind.

Perhaps the new mantra is “we’re going to make transmission great again,” Skelly said.

The organization, an initiative of the Energy Future Coalition, has held regional transmission conferences, but this was its first national event.

The coalition was formed in 2002 by former Sen. Tim Wirth, a Colorado Democrat; Republican C. Boyden Gray, who served as White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush; and Democrat John Podesta, a former aide to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

“I’d love to have more load growth. It ain’t going to happen,” Craig Glazer, PJM’s vice president for federal government policy, told the gathering.

Weak load growth will make it more complicated to finance upgrades for aging transmission, and the lack of a federal carbon tax or renewable mandate is making it difficult to integrate renewable generation, Glazer said.

Hoecker and Brown discussed FERC’s inability to gain “backstop” siting authority, saying it’s still very difficult to prevent individual states from blocking a project. The Energy Policy Act of 2015 amended the Federal Power Act to give FERC the authority to site electric transmission lines blocked by states, but court rulings have blocked the commission’s attempts to use it, prompting some in Congress to propose additional legislation strengthening FERC’s authority.

Brown said that Order 1000 hasn’t really helped SPP much with large regional projects.

“We need to decide what we want this grid of the future to look like,” Glazer said. For example, should it be a “localized grid” that can harness distributed generation? he asked. “There’s an added complication; it’s not even clear who is in charge,” Glazer said. FERC, state utility commissions and governors all have a say in siting decisions, he said.

If each governor is asked what infrastructure projects they want, the country will end up with a lot of state-based projects, not interstate ones, Clean Line Energy Partners President Mike Skelly said.

Perhaps the new mantra is “we’re going to make transmission great again,” Skelly said. The power to select infrastructure projects should not be taken away from transmission planners and placed in the hands of Congress, he said.

Skelly and others cautioned the Trump administration not to skimp on project reviews or stakeholder input. The key is that all projects must have “timelines” for regulatory approvals to avoid infinite delays, he said.

The executive director of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Council, Brad Markell, said the labor movement agrees with the need for “hard timelines” to shorten the permit process.

Markell said that labor unions have been in contact with the Trump administration on potential infrastructure efforts.

“From our point of view, more power for the federal government and less power for the states [on electric infrastructure] would be a good thing,” he said.

Others deemed that unlikely. “I think we’re stuck with the system we have,” Glazer said.

Mary Anne Hitt, executive director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, said that — contrary to what conference participants may have heard — her organization doesn’t oppose all power lines, only those that appear aimed to “prop up fossil fuels.”

The environmental group opposed the abandoned “coal by wire” Potomac-Appalachian Transmission Highline (PATH) project in PJM. On the other hand, it has backed the Plains and Eastern Clean Line Project, designed to move renewable energy from Oklahoma to Tennessee.

Hitt said she was concerned that President Trump’s nominee for EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, opposed Clean Line in 2015 as Oklahoma attorney general.

Curiously, there are no sessions scheduled there addressing the unsettled question of whether the federal government has any legitimate interest in transmission siting.

The so-called remedial action scheme Dominion prepared and presented this week to PJM Interconnection, the operator of the 13-state electrical grid Virginia is plugged into, would cut power to Hampton, two-thirds of Newport News, Poquoson and eastern York County if there are faults on two of the dozens of components in the Peninsula's high transmission network.

They say Dominion's been using scare tactics when it has said there could be as many as 80 days a year in which rolling blackouts are possible. Dominion says that's the number of days when demand is so heavy that faults in the system could force it to cut some customers off in order to avoid a widespread blackout.

"It appears that Dominion Virginia Power would rather continue their campaign to frighten consumers and threaten to close their Yorktown power plants," said James Zinn, a trustee with the Save the James Alliance, who argues that federal law allows the U.S. Department of Energy to order a power plant to operate in an emergency.

"If nothing else, this is consistent with their continued inflexibility to consider less intrusive alternatives for their construction of towers over the historic James River," he said.

Two-thirds of MISO’s $7.5 million in DAMAP payments to wind resources in 2015 and 2016 was because of over-forecasting and only $2.5 million was spent on curtailment, Patton said. “Most of our wind DAMAP payments are unjustified,” he said.

The purpose of DAMAP is to provide an incentive for Market Participants to be flexible in their offers in the real-time market.

The DAMAP compensates suppliers when (i) the real-time dispatch of a resource is reduced below the day-ahead schedule's level, and (ii) the market participant would have been financially better off in real-time had it operated at its day-ahead schedule.

The DPA is not asking PJM to do something it has never done before. PJM has reevaluated
projects in the past. After reconsideration, PJM canceled the Mid-Atlantic Power Pathway ("MAPP") and the Pennsylvania-Allegheny Transmission Highway ("PATH") projects.

While the reasons for cancellation may be different in this case, the fact of the matter is that simply because PJM has approved a project does not mean that it gets done come what may. In cancelling the MAPP and PATH projects, PJM acknowledged that changed circumstances had caused it to reevaluate the projects; unfortunately, however, ratepayers are paying significant abandonment costs. We ask PJM to re-evaluate this Project before LS Power and PSE&G incur costs that will ultimately be recovered from ratepayers of all PJM members.

The DPA asks PJM to remember that end-use customers are ultimately the ones that pay
for projects such as this. Indeed, neither PJM nor its member companies would exist if not for customers. And those customers are not a wallet from which PJM and its member utilities can obtain unlimited funds.

PJM Interconnection is a regional transmission organization (RTO) that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Acting as a neutral, independent party, PJM operates a competitive wholesale electricity market and manages the high-voltage electricity grid to ensure reliability for more than 61 million people.

PJM’s long-term regional planning process provides a broad, interstate perspective that identifies the most effective and cost-efficient improvements to the grid to ensure reliability and economic benefits on a system wide basis.

An independent Board oversees PJM’s activities. Effective governance and a collaborative stakeholder process help PJM achieve its vision: “To be the electric industry leader – today and tomorrow – in reliable operations, efficient wholesale markets, and infrastructure development.”

Based on a variety of sources.  Numbers are estimations and may be rounded.

Big Transmission never did and never will make sense. Let’s look at a half-dozen reasons why: 1) the laws of physics, 2) higher reliability risk, 3) stricter contingency limits, 4) lumpiness and investment risk, 5) rigidity of source and sink, and 6) better alternatives.

It is difficult to apportion the demise of PATH among reduced load growth, the Mt. Storm-Doubs alternative, new generation, and sophisticated statelevel opposition. However, it is fair to observe that reduced load growth had only postponed PATH in the past (three times). What was different in 2010 was the emergence of the Mt. Storm-Doubs  alternative, and the focus of a state regulator on that alternative.

But certainly when Big Transmission is dependent upon market conditions the lumpiness and risk factors are all the more daunting. Big Transmission somehow needs to bring together generation resources and market demand – to the exclusion of alternatives – to forge a level of commitment that will last for many years. That’s a prerequisite for financing. So the entities at each end need to perceive such a compelling business proposition that they will forego other alternatives and cast their fate with Big Transmission. That’s a tough sell.

FERC requires that utilities interconnect all new generation. So a new generator is assured of being able to interconnect its project to the utility serving the territory it is located in; the issue is solely how much money and time it will take for the interconnection. Given this legally assured ability to access the grid through the resident utility, market-based Big Transmission is effectively competing with that utility and thus must offer substantial value added.

Liars overemphasize their truthfulness. “To tell you the truth…” “Honestly…” “I swear to you…” Oh, if only it were so! When people use these bolstering statements to emphasize their honesty, there’s a good chance they are hiding something. Learning to baseline someone’s normal behavior is important in situations such as this:  You want to listen for normal or harmless use of such phrases. There’s no need to add them if you really are telling the truth, so be on guard.

"The growth has been in some fits and starts, but we're at a point now where this is an essential project to continue to provide, really, the type of service, the level of service, that our customers expect from us," Fakult told the Asbury Park Press. "It reinforces the system in that area. It allows us to, again, provide better, more reliable, resilient service."

"The time is now," Fakult said. "It just needs to be done now."

Nearly 16 years ago, the utility scrapped plans for a 6.5-mile transmission line, to be run on 60-foot high steel poles, along the railroad tracks from Matawan to Middletown, after intense community opposition. Residents and some town officials, fearing a reduction in property values and worried about health risks, fought the project for a decade.

"To me, it is nothing but a resurrection of precisely the same plan that we fought and stopped," said state Assemblywoman Amy Handlin, R-Monmouth, a vocal opponent years ago. "It's the phoenix rising from the ashes, it's the ghost of battles past. It's not different."

This time, the utility proposes to run the wires atop slender single poles that average 140 feet tall rather than bulky towers used in the past, spokesman Ron Morano said.

The use of the NJ Transit corridor, which is already designated for public use and has existing electric infrastructure, as well as the slimmer monopoles, will help to minimize the disruption on the community, Fakult said.

Morano, the JCP&L spokesman, said the utility follows all safety and heath guidelines and will have an electromagnetic fields expert available at open house sessions. "We are successfully building transmission lines in other (areas) without any issues," she said.

PJM Interconnection, the organization that oversees the electric grid in 13 states and Washington D.C., has identified the Monmouth County Reliability Project as a necessary project to reduce the length and frequency of outages in Monmouth County, the utility said.

If not built, "over the long term, you start to see issues emerge," Fakult said. "When you start to see peaking conditions, you just don't have the contingencies that you need to run the system reliably."

As noted in the fact sheet, Energizing the Future is a transmission initiative through 2017 that involves upgrading and strengthening the grid to meet the future demands of customers and communities. Key factors driving that investment include enhancing system reliability by replacing existing equipment with advanced technologies; meeting projected load growth; and reinforcing the system in light of power plant deactivations, the fact sheet added.

The company plans to hold three open house events in neighborhoods near the proposed project to share information with the public and gather feedback. The company also is setting up a website at www.monmouthreliability.com.

To approve negotiated rates for a transmission project, the Commission must find that the rates are just and reasonable. To do so, the Commission must determine that the merchant transmission owner has assumed the full market risk for the cost of constructing its proposed transmission project.

Rock Island meets the definition of a merchant transmission owner because it assumes all market risk associated with the Project and has no captive customers. Rock Island has agreed to bear all the risk that the Project will succeed or fail based on whether a market exists for its services.

Rock Island also argues that wind generators, whose energy the Project will likely transmit, present numerous risks that transmission project developers and investors must overcome. For example, Rock Island states that wind energy projects are typically constructed with shorter lead times than other generators and are less willing to commit to large transmission projects well in advance of generator construction. Rock Island argues that pre-subscription of capacity with creditworthy anchor customers can reduce financing obstacles because lenders demand to see a secure source of revenue as a predicate to project financing.

Opponents used some of those arguments to successfully derail the Potomac-Appalachian Transmission Highline, a 290-mile line from Putnam County, W.Va., to Frederick County, Md., proposed by Allegheny Energy in 2008. The Greensburg company, acquired by FirstEnergy in 2011, suspended the project after it could not convince regulators the line was necessary.

PJM staff reviewed results of analyses showing reliability drivers no longer exist for the project throughout the 15-year planning cycle. The analyses incorporated the continued trends of decreasing customer load growth, increasing participation in demand response programs and the recent commitment of new generating capacity in eastern PJM.

While citizen groups have fought transmission projects — often successfully — by attacking the developer’s need to build them, the environmental regulations could usher in more projects and complicate opposition.

Changing drivers of transmission

Transmission companies see big potential for new projects, particularly from sparsely populated areas that generate wind energy to urban areas. “Just as trains carried cattle and other goods from the rural areas to urban centers, the Plains & Eastern Clean Line will carry renewable energy from the Plains of the Southwest,” states the website of one developer, Clean Line Energy of Houston, Texas.

Clean Line expects federal approval for its 700-mile Plains & Eastern Clean Line, designed to carry 4,000 megawatts of power from wind farms in the panhandle of Oklahoma. The line will terminate near Memphis, Tenn. Clean Line has four other projects in the pipeline.

“We anticipate a very busy 2016,” said company president Michael Skelly. 

...some wind mills and solar farms in areas with constant breeze and abundant sunshine