Climate and energy

The Kansas Electric Transmission Authority (KETA) met last Friday. It was a marathon session, so I’ll break up my notes into different batches.

First up, a briefing from the Southwest Power Pool (SPP).

Note: For those of you who read these transmission entries and scream, “WHY IS ALL THIS GOING SO SLOW???” – all I can tell you is – transmission is not a burger. You don’t just plop it on the grill, flip it a few times, and then chow down.

Transmission is not a burger. Transmission is a brisket. Those take much longer. And if the cook has a clue, then the time is also usually worth it.

A little background to begin with. Those of you who follow transmission issues already know the basics: (1) as carbon legislation has loomed, wind power on the Plains has become increasingly attractive as a low-cost energy resource,  (2) the boom in wind development put a great deal of pressure on our regional transmission operator, SPP, and they are having to totally revamp their planning and cost allocation processes as a result, and (3) states in wind-rich areas who want to develop transmission are having to dovetail their own planning with the SPP revamp.

And, oh yeah, Waxman-Markey – or the American Clean Energy and Security Act – passed by a vote of 219-212 in the House (the evening of the KETA meeting, actually). ACES would limit greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide, from electrical generation and other industrial processes.

Okay.

SPP personnel briefed KETA members on the progress of their new planning process – aka,  the synergistic planning process. (They are planing their planning process right now, basically.)

The synergistic planning process combines all of SPP’s formerly separate planning processes. The major differences between old and new planning – the new planning looks at a 20 year horizon for transmission planning, uses a 40 year financial benefits calculation, and revisits said plan on a three year cycle. (Previous planning looked at much shorter time frames and payback periods, which meant it was much harder to pencil out a transmission line.) The new planning also combines economic benefits with reliability benefits, rather than separating them out, and takes a more holistic view of transmission benefits overall.

The whole point here is to make it easier to build the transmission needed for regional wind development, without sacrificing reliability or affordability.

To get to this perfect transmission world, SPP is doing three basic things: (1) working on the planning, see above, they hope to have a proposal by the October board meeting (2) putting together the list of priority projects to tide transmission development in the meantime (this is a big deal! see below!), and (3) duking it out, I mean figuring out, cost allocation.

Cost Allocation

Take (3) first, because the briefing was very detailed on (2), light on (1), and mostly skipped (3). And I know our blog readers care deeply and passionately about (3).

The SPP is considering a cost allocation process known as the highway-byway system. The Extra High Voltage (EHV) lines – I think mostly 765 kV and 345 kV, don’t know about 230 (this all has to be decided)- will perhaps be paid for through a regional cost allocation, where everyone in the SPP region would contribute to the cost of the line. The byways are the smaller lines. Those smaller lines in the past have usually been paid for by people in the local transmission areas.

Again, this is all being figured out, and nothing is decided. The tentative deadline for a proposal to the SPP board is around October.

However, the proposal did raise a couple of questions for me. On one hand, it’s great if the regional cost allocations work out for the big EHV lines. Without those lines, Kansas can’t export its wind, we have so few people out here that we sure can’t afford to build the lines ourselves – and by gum, our wind can benefit the nation in many ways, from reducing GHG emissions to strengthening national security, so, yeah, why SHOULD a handful of people bear all the costs for something that benefits the entire hive?

On the other hand. How can a highway/ byway cost allocation be structured so that we don’t build that huge highway without adequate entrance ramps or exits?

Here’s the deal. EHV lines can’t be tapped into just anywhere. They need smaller voltage collector systems that can feed into them at certain points – they need byways.

Kansas has an wholly inadequate grid of highways AND byways. And the byways are especially poor out where the highways are going in.

Ideally, there is a way to structure the planning and the cost allocation so that there is a balance between transmission highways and byways in Kansas – because if you just have the highways, and very few people can afford access to the byways, then that will become a very contentious issue.

I know we’re all focused on the big lines, but we can’t forget – this is about the whole grid, and smaller lines matter a great deal, too.

Crop diversity is healthy, right? Well, transmission diversity is healthy, too. Especially when you’re trying to build a renewable energy market from the ground up, with many different market niches and economic opportunities.

Diversity means resilence in tough times – and the cycle of Kansas is all about tough times. They’ll come again (and again) and the right infrastructure can help us recover faster when it happens.

Priority Projects

Moving right along… what, you may ask, are priority projects? This is the magic list. If your transmission project is on this list, it will have a much easier time moving ahead while SPP works out the kinks in the new planning process. They aren’t going to make everyone wait till they get their ducks in a row, not if you have an important project already fairly well advanced in the planning stages. If you get on the final draft of this list, “staff will work with stakeholders in order to facilitate rapid construction.”

Getting included in the first draft of the list was highly democratic. The SPP put out a call, its stakeholders answered, and the result was a massive list of over 120 projects (some duplicative) that people think are high priority.

You don’t stay on the list, though, unless you pass some tests. What tests? That is currently being decided. There will be Inclusion Criteria (projects that meet the standards necessary to undergo numerical analysis), and Project Metrics (the markers by which the analysis is carried out).

You can find the basic draft of all this here (.pdf). In this draft, the Inclusion Criteria favors transmission that addresses congestion corridors, helps out with aggregate transmission service requests, furthers cluster studies for the Generation/ Interconnection process, provides strong economic impact, and offers east-west transfer capability in the SPP footprint.

These criteria probably won’t be done by mid-July, but they’ll be done enough to start crossing some projects off the list. Not all 120 proposed projects will make it to the metrics stage. The metrics will be used to rank the remaining projects.

The proposed Project Metrics got the attention of some of the KETA board members. One stood out for Senator Pat Apple – the environmental impacts criteria, which allows SOX NOX mercury and carbon dioxide emissions to be modeled for the fuel types used in the generating units, to figure out the emissions costs on a per ton basis.

The Senator raised the question of why different types of generation units are being considered, when the SPP is supposed to focus on transmission. SPP responded that they are supposed to support flexible transmission that offers access to the lowest cost resource, and in a world that regulates greenhouse gas emissions, high-emission generators (like coal plants, which have the bulk of SOX NOX mercury and CO2 emissions) will not be the lowest cost resources anymore. Different generators have different environmental impacts, and differing environmental impacts translate into different economic impacts, and those have to be taken into account.

Senator Apple asked if older coal plants would be penalized for transmission improvements. Answer: They would probably be seen as a lesser priority for planning.

The big question – what Kansas transmission projects made it on to the first version of the magic list? Answer: Several, including portions of the EHV ITC/ Westar line from Spearville to Wichita. (It’s hard for me to tell from the list, though, if it is in there as 345 or 765).

HOWEVER. Keeping the Kansas projects on the list is by no means a given. Just because these projects are important to us, doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of the SPP footprint is convinced, or that our projects can make it through the evaluation process.

Also, EHV lines are not necessarily a shoo-in for the Priority Projects list, because cost allocation is not sorted out yet, and that makes it difficult to quantify the full economic impact of the line.

That was more than enough to read for one day, wasn’t it? Be glad I am splitting up the notes from this KETA meeting into separate blog entries. Lots of info to take in.

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org