In Iowa, researchers seeking a stronger, lighter power line

Posted on 04/10/2013 by Dan Haugen

Lighter power lines would require fewer transmission towers, which can make up half the cost of a new line. (Photo by Michael Kappel via Creative Commons)

Alan Russell calls today’s transmission lines — clusters of steel wires surrounded by strands of aluminum — “a bundle of compromises.”

The steel is heavy and doesn’t conduct electricity well, but it’s needed to support the aluminum, which would otherwise sag too much under the weight of its load.

It’s bulky and unwieldy, but utilities have used the combination since the 1960s, building strong, tightly spaced towers to hold it up off the ground.

Russell, a materials scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory in Iowa, is part of a team that’s working on a next generation power cable — one that’s lighter, stronger, and more conductive.

The lab is about to begin several months of testing to confirm the strength of their new material, a metal composite made from aluminum and calcium. If they can prove the material has the properties they think it does, the discovery could lead to lower costs for transmission projects. →

Indiana lawmakers advance plan to give utilities more power over rate increases

Posted on 04/09/2013 by Bill Malcolm

(Photo by Michael Sarver via Creative Commons)

A bill that would would allow Indiana utilities to pass along the costs of new transmission, distribution, and storage infrastructure investments directly to ratepayers – without filing a rate case before state regulators – is advancing through the state legislature.

The omnibus regulatory reform bill (SB 560) is supported by the Indiana Energy Association, a trade group that represents the state’s investor-owned utilities. It passed the state House in March and was sent back to the Senate with amendments.

Among other things, the legislation would facilitate a new utility cost recovery “trackers” for infrastructure including distribution, transmission, and storage facilities. Currently, such costs are allowed for recovery only via rate case filings, which can take a year or more to process. →

As a power line moves in, an organic farm ponders its future

Posted on 03/15/2013 by Dan Haugen

Dave Minar, right, owner of Cedar Summit Farm, worries high-voltage power lines will affect the quality of his soil. (Photo by Cedar Summit Farm via Creative Commons)

An organic dairy farm in Minnesota has become a high-profile example of the tensions that can emerge as new transmission lines are built through the rural countryside.

The owners of Cedar Summit Farm, in the path of the CapX2020 transmission project, claim the line threatens their business and want Minnesota lawmakers to increase compensation for farms that choose to relocate away from power lines.

If Cedar Summit opts to move, its status as a certified organic farm complicates the process. It takes three years to transition conventional farmland to organic, which means a move could disrupt its certification as well as production of its milk, cream and other products, which are treasured by customers for their high quality.

In an online petition with more than 4,000 signatures, Cedar Summit, which is also renowned for its sustainable agriculture practices, says either the farm will have to move or “work around high voltage power lines … that may affect the health of our employees, animals and land.”

Farm owner Dave Minar told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in February that the farm “can’t be sustainable beneath a high-power line,” and other farmers have expressed similar concerns to lawmakers.

Minar acknowledges, however, that there is little if any science to support that claim.

“We didn’t find any documents studying the effects of this voltage on organic pastures, so the best we can say is there have been no studies,” he told Minnesota Public Radio last week. “The issue here is the lack of data, and we’re not interested in being Guinea pigs.”

In an interview with Midwest Energy News, Cedar Summit sales and marketing manager Ryan Crum said they believe electromagnetic fields (EMF) from the power lines will lower milk production and hurt the health of both the cows and microorganisms in the soil that support organic farming.

While it’s true that existing EMF studies don’t specifically address organic farming, volumes of research have been published on how EMFs affect both humans and animals, including dairy cows.

And from the National Institutes of Health to the World Health Organization, the conclusion of every mainstream health organization to study power-line EMFs in recent decades is that they are not a cause for concern. →

Can the grid handle distributed renewable energy?

Posted on 03/05/2013 by Dan Ferber

“Smart” switches on power lines can help regulate a two-way flow of electricity. (Photo via Department of Energy)

As solar panels and electric cars catch on among consumers, managing the grid becomes an increasingly vexing challenge for utilities.

To keep track of these and other distributed energy resources, utilities are installing ever more smart meters and other monitoring equipment. They now need to track far more data from far-flung locations just to reliably keep the power on.

The challenge is not insurmountable, but going forward the electric power industry will need new technology and new business and regulatory models, three experts said last week at the annual conference of the Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E). →

Is Iowa paying to help other states meet renewable goals?

Posted on 02/19/2013 by Dan Haugen

(Photo by Karen Kleis via Creative Commons)

As the country rebuilds its aging transmission system, spending more than $14 billion this year alone, there’s a looming, unanswered question: who gets the bill?

Federal regulators are attempting to equitably distribute the costs, but a recent complaint by an Iowa utility shows that the issue is far from settled.

Interstate Power & Light Co. says its customers are unfairly shouldering the costs of connecting wind farms to the electricity grid. The utility, which is a subsidiary of Alliant Energy, wants federal regulators to spread the cost of local interconnection projects, which mostly benefit other utilities that import wind power, it says.

The company’s complaint against transmission company ITC Midwest is currently pending before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

“The fundamental question here is: who pays?” said Jim Hoecker, general counsel for WIRES, a nonprofit that represents the electric transmission industry. →

FERC dismisses complaint over CapX2020 ownership

Posted on 02/08/2013 by Dan Haugen

Xcel Energy does not have to share ownership of a planned Twin Cities-to-La Crosse transmission line with a Wisconsin competitor, federal regulators ruled earlier this week.

American Transmission Company (ATC) had argued it was entitled to own part of the $490 million project in a complaint to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

On Monday, FERC denied ATC’s complaint and said MISO, the Midwest’s electricity grid operator, was correct to distribute ownership of the transmission project as it did. →

Midwest grid operator expanding south, to ‘last frontier’ for renewables

Posted on 02/05/2013 by Dan Haugen

MISO’s current territory is shown in green on this map, with Entergy in blue. (Image via MISO)

The Midwest’s electricity grid operator later this year is expected to add more than 15,000 miles of transmission and 30,000 megawatts of generation to its system overnight — at midnight, to be precise, on Dec. 18.

That’s the date MISO, pending a few remaining regulatory hurdles, will assume responsibility for operating the electric grid in much of Arkansas and Louisiana and parts of Texas and Mississippi.

The area’s transmission has been run since the 1950s by Entergy, a group of southern utilities that was recently pressured by regulators to give up grid management and focus on power generation.

MISO says its new scale and “footprint diversity” will help improve reliability and efficiency and save money, with annual benefits to existing member utilities exceeding $1.2 billion.

Wind energy advocates are also hopeful the integration could pave the way for grid and policy changes to help clean energy reach one of the “last frontiers” for renewables: the Southeast. →

Is wind power reaching a tipping point?

Posted on 02/04/2013 by Dan Ferber

(Photo by Adrian S. Jones via Creative Commons)

In 2012, for the first time, more new wind generation was installed than new natural gas- or coal-fired generation as developers rushed to take advantage of expiring tax credits.

Many in the wind industry don’t expect as big of a year in 2013. But if utilities and policymakers heed the findings of two recent reports from grid managers and planners, the next two decades will look a lot more like 2012 — with wind and other renewables continuing to outpace new fossil-fuel generation.

In late December, a Department of Energy-funded planning group released a landmark report indicating that building out wind generation and associated transmission is more affordable over the long haul than continuing to rely mostly on coal and gas for supplying the eastern United States with electricity between now and 2030.

Also in December, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) released a report with a detailed long-term assessment of generation and transmission needs for the Texas interconnection. Using recent real-world data on wind and solar installation, prices and generation potential, they found that new wind and solar installations would outpace natural gas plants between now and 2032.

Renewable energy advocates say the results mean that wind and solar can cost-effectively provide most of our energy, and perhaps sooner than we realize. Other energy analysts, however, caution that which generation sources get built still depends very much on policy. →

In Indiana, debate over how ‘trackers’ shape future energy system

Posted on 01/17/2013 by Dan Ferber

Transmission lines near Walnut, Indiana. (Photo by Patrick Finnegan via Creative Commons)

New legislation in the Indiana Senate would ensure a healthy, guaranteed profit in perpetuity on utility investments in wires, telephone poles, substations, and other parts of the transmission and distribution infrastructure, and ratepayer advocates and environmentalists are crying foul.

If such a measure becomes law, they say, it will burden low-income ratepayers with unnecessarily high bills and further entrench centralized, coal- and gas-based electricity generation, placing distributed, renewable generation at a disadvantage.

At issue in the new legislation is an important but esoteric provision of utility law called a cost tracker. When states allow trackers, they bypass rate cases, a key step in which state utility regulators scrutinize the books of monopoly electric utilities on behalf of the customers who are forced to buy their electricity. →

Municipal aggregation: a new direction or the same old thing?

Posted on 12/17/2012 by Kari Lydersen

A row of homes in Cincinnati, Ohio. (Photo by Ian Freimuth via Creative Commons)

In the past two years, scores of communities across the Midwest, particularly in Illinois, have adopted municipal aggregation of their electricity supplies, wherein city officials break with long-standing utilities and decide where to buy cheaper and often cleaner electricity from alternative suppliers on behalf of residents.

Chicago is among the most recent, and with the city’s vast buying power, renewable energy advocates are hoping to use the opportunity to make a significant dent in pollution and carbon emissions.

However, if the experience of another Midwest state is any indicator, whether that actually happens could be difficult to determine.

Ohio was one of the first states to enact legislation allowing municipalities to aggregate, adding the concept to the legislation that deregulated the state’s energy market in 2001. Currently at least 220 Ohio communities have chosen electric aggregation, and 120 have adopted natural gas aggregation, according to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. And in the last two years at least 160 new electric aggregator broker companies have gotten state certification.

Ohio provides an interesting case study in the ways aggregation can play out; especially since it is historically known as a coal state: the fifth-most coal-dependent in the country according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, with a powerful mining industry and 20 major coal-fired power plants (though about half of them are scheduled to close in coming years).

Ohio also symbolizes the way aggregation can be a complicated mix of idealism and pragmatism, of making realistic deals in the present while hoping for more sweeping changes in the future. →

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