Mission: Transmission - Harvesting the breeze is trickier than it sounds

Apr 28th 2008
From Economist.com

“BANANA” is the wind industry’s bitter motto for its farms—meaning Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. Most people do not want to see or hear a wind farm, just as they want to stay clear of other power plants.

Although people tend not to live in windy areas, BANANA can complicate another necessity for wind farms (as it can for most sources of electricity): transmission. Given the gigantic distances in America especially, remote generators require miles of nuts-and-bolts infrastructure to get the power to population centres.

Transmission is expensive and often an afterthought, at least for consumers. Even within windy areas the generators are often scattered across wide expanses, which makes gathering it and bringing it to market difficult. Rob Gramlich of the American Wind Energy Association calls transmission the industry’s “biggest long-term barrier”.

Texas leads the nation in wind power, most of which comes from its remote western plains, and it has made transmission infrastructure a priority, according to Jess Totten of Texas’s Public Utility Commission, who spoke at an MIT energy conference earlier this month. The creation of “Competitive Renewable Energy Zones”, which identify wind-rich and encourage their development, has allowed Texas to gather wind projects together, making transmission easier.

Other parts of America are also hoping for a burst of building. In Maine, the best wind is in the northern and central parts of the state, hundreds of miles from New England’s population centres of Portland, Boston and Providence. In New York, the wind is upstate and the people down in New York City. In California, where wind development has stalled in recent years, a big project to bring power to population-rich Southern California from rural Tehachapi, one of the windiest areas of the state, is moving ahead. Its completion could restart California’s wind industry.

As America’s demand for electricity grows, transmission developers will run into BANANA issues even for wires. High-tension aerial lines are not glamorous. Nobody wants to live near them. In New York, a 190-mile proposed upstate-to-downstate transmission line has run into opposition from residents who dread the words “eminent domain”.

Stephen Conant of the New England Independent Transmission Company plans an undersea cable to shuttle energy from wind farms in Northern Maine to Boston. “We minimise BANANA by going under the ocean,” he says. “So long as the fish don’t start voting.”

Then there are costs. In a place like rural Kansas, where the right-of-way is cheap, new line can cost as little as $500,000 per mile. But putting transmission underground, through a dense suburban area like Boston’s, can cost up to $20m per mile.

In Texas, $3-6 billion more is needed for transmission, according to a recent filing by ERCOT, the Texas electrical grid operator. Overall, across America, between $12-15 billion per year is being spent on transmission infrastructure, according to Lawrence Makovich of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Costs are worsening with the rocketing prices of steel, copper and engineering services.

All of which raises the pesky question of who pays. One way or another it is generally the users, who naturally resent the extra charges. But being fair to everyone is complicated. A transmission system is a network; when you connect a new line to an existing system, it affects power flows throughout. The actual costs can be hard to predict. The electricity industry’s answer is “socialisation”—the cost of any new capacity is spread evenly among a state’s consumers. This can be an effective quick fix, but it risks burying price signals and creating some thorny interstate issues.

Arizona, for instance, has access to much cheaper electricity than does neighbouring southern California. So naturally Arizonans chafe at the idea of building new transmission lines across their beautiful state, lines which would connect with California’s grid to reduce prices there—while raising them at home. If planners are going BANANAs, there is good reason for it.