National Electric Transmission Congestion Study - W2agz.com

Baltimore area will face numerous violations of
reliability criteria over the next 15 years. 45
There are no easy solutions to these problems. Old,
inefficient power plants should be retired or upgraded,
and there is often opposition to retaining existing
or building new generation within urban areas
where it is often needed to support local voltage and
grid reliability. Air pollution regulations sometimes
limit when and at what output levels existing or new
central station and distributed generation can operate.
In principle, additional transmission capacity
would enable delivery of enough bulk power to
meet customers’ demands. New transmission lines,
however, would go through many communities that
may oppose the construction of new overhead
high-voltage power lines, while utilities and their
customers oppose incurring high costs to make such
lines less intrusive aesthetically by putting them underground.
Energy efficiency, demand response,
and other demand-side measures can reduce loads
and improve the balance between supply and demand,
but those measures must be pursued over extended
periods in order for their impacts to grow to
transmission- or power plant-equivalent quantities.
As planners in PJM, NYISO, and ISO-NE have recognized,
all of these measures should be pursued on
an integrated basis to ensure an adequate response
to the economic and reliability challenges ahead.
Electricity supply and transmission planners in the
Mid-Atlantic area are looking west, particularly to
West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana, where
there are extensive coal resources and the willingness
to host power plants as a means of fostering
economic development. West Virginia and western
Pennsylvania also have significant potential wind
resources. In addition, the Midwest has comfortable
reserves of generation for the near term, particularly
low-cost, base-load nuclear and coal generation.
Nonetheless, major transmission upgrades will be
needed in parts of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and
perhaps Ohio to enable delivery of enough Midwestern
generation to the Mid-Atlantic area to meet
that area’s growing reliability and economic needs.
Several new high-voltage transmission lines have
been proposed to address these needs, but to date no
region-wide analysis has been published confirming
that the proposed lines would provide the facilities
the region needs to strengthen its overall system
and facilitate greater imports. As the entity responsible
under FERC oversight for transmission planning
within its broad footprint, PJM is the appropriate
entity to respond to this analytic challenge.
New York City’s electricity supply problems are especially
complex and difficult. Building new generation
capacity within the city is extremely challenging
because of air quality restrictions, high real
estate values, fuel supply problems, and local opposition
to power plants. Some additional generation
is being added north of the city to serve the city’s requirements.
Adding major new transmission lines
to the north and northwest would increase the options
available to the city for power. During the
summer the city could be served by excess, relatively
inexpensive hydropower from Canada. The
flexibility provided by new transmission could also
enable the city to tap recently proposed in-state
wind power and clean coal generating capacity, if
they are developed. An alternative is to supply a
portion of the city’s needs by strengthening ties to
PJM and using the PJM network to access coal-fired
generation in western PJM, but this would affect
electricity supplies and costs within PJM.
The organizations directly responsible (under
FERC oversight) for transmission planning across
this area are PJM and NYISO. They perform and
publish analyses for their respective areas on an ongoing
basis, coordinate their activities, and seek to
extend the time horizons of their respective analyses
farther into the future. All of these efforts are
important, and continuation of them is vital.
Additional efforts are needed, however, at the
inter-regional level. The electric systems of the
Mid-Atlantic states and New York have become so
highly interdependent that it is not possible to address
the Mid-Atlantic problems without affecting
New York’s electric system, and vice versa.
45 Ibid.
U.S. Department of Energy / National Electric Transmission Congestion Study / 2006 43