31 Flavors of Transmission

31 Flavors of Transmission

Energy Prospects - 10/6/04

"Siting transmission lines today is tough."

With that one sentence, Steve Wright, administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration, managed to sum up the entire raison d'etre for the two-day-long "Energizing the Northwest, Today and Tomorrow" conference held in Portland on Sept. 28 and 29. As the owner of 75 percent of the transmission lines in the region, and as the overseeing authority on what Wright called "the largest transmission project in the nation," BPA well knows the need for new transmission lines, as well as the pitfalls they usually encounter.

As it pays approximately $175 million for an 84-mile line to run from Grand Coulee to Bell near Spokane, Wash., BPA is also looking to solve one of the most vexing transmission needs in the country: the Olympic Peninsula in northwest Washington state. As a result of the myriad environmental, cost and logistical issues that the Olympic Peninsula raises, BPA has been forced to look into a variety of methods for feeding the growing need for power in the area.

From distributed generation to conservation to peak-load demand reduction, BPA is analyzing the potential for a number of non-wires solutions to an age-old problem: How to get more power to customers without building costly and unsightly transmission lines. The solution may well be "anything that isn't poles and wires," or non-wires solutions. Robert Kahn, the executive director of the Northwest Independent Power Producers Coalition, calls it "transmission in 31 flavors."

To better understand the possible benefits that non-wires solutions may hold for the industry, BPA instituted its Non-Wires Initiative and a Non-Wires Solutions Roundtable two years ago. Members of that roundtable spoke at the conference and assessed the possibility of solving transmission bottlenecks through non-construction alternatives. Representatives of large power customers, local utilities and other industry groups also discussed their needs for a transmission solution, and industry members of all types discussed the skepticism they have for these non-construction alternatives ever becoming a plausible reality.

"The separation of responsibility without coordination makes it difficult to create a bulk power system in its entirety from generation to retail customer loads and provide lowest-cost electricity and reliability," said Tom Foley, a consultant with Energy and Environmental Economics and a member of the roundtable. "A single wise and benevolent grid operator might get us there."

The conversations were not all doom and gloom, however. It was pointed out that in March 2004 a demand-reduction pilot run by BPA provided some encouraging results for easing congestion on the transmission lines currently serving the area.

During the four-day long test, BPA simulated a severe-weather event and asked the four participants in the project to reduce their need for transmission services. When the test began, BPA posted the hourly rate it would pay for each megawatt of demand reduction, and the participants -- a utility and three large electricity users -- could accept, counter or reject the offer entirely. During the tests, BPA purchased an average of 22 MW of peak-demand reduction per hour. This exceeded BPA's projection of 10 to 20 MW of reduction.

With so much effort being put into studying non-construction alternatives, and little actual action beyond the efforts of utilities and power companies to promote conservation and efficiency, the possibility of actually seeing real-life applications of non-wires solutions was thoroughly questioned.

John Nierenberg, acting director of transportation and distribution planning at Seattle City Light, talked about the constraints his utility is trying to overcome in the face of massive development of a biotech industry in a highly congested and constrained piece of its service area. The technology-intensive companies will be pulling between 2 MW and 25 MW into each new building in an area that is currently filled with warehouses. "We need solutions now," he said.

To accomplish this Herculean task, Neirenberg, a self-described "wires guy," is looking at a variety of solutions that include non-wires pieces, upgrading the existing grid with new types of semi-conductors and wires, and trying to find ways to bring new wires into the neighborhood.

Marek Samotyj, a program director at the Electricity Innovation Institute, said it is imperative for utilities to look ahead five years and imagine the system being built now, then. How will it hold up? How well will it be prepared to use what would, by then, be standard technologies that are only in their infancy now?

Nierenberg responded with an answer on the lips of many industry professionals: "We're trying to build a nimble system," he said. "We're trying to think ahead, but we're afraid to be too early of an adopter."

Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a member of the Non-Wires Roundtable, noted that Nierenberg's concern is one reason that the non-wires concept, for all its potential, has yet to solve any problems. Nationwide, he pointed out, the total investment in research and development by utilities and power companies is one-quarter of 1 percent of their total budgets.

"This is a problem because it does not give the whole range of options to solve the problems," Cavanagh said. [Charles Redell]

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