US trumps states over siting power lines

Designated as part of a national power 'corridor' Tuesday, Virginia could see transmission towers near Civil War sites.

from the October 4, 2007 edition

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Indeed, the new corridors are not needed to boost reliability, say state officials and some grid-reliability experts. They say the corridors are aimed mainly at making it possible for large, deregulated utilities to profit from transmitting cheap coal-fired power from the Ohio Valley to the East Coast.

What raises suspicions for some is the sweeping scope of the corridor along the Eastern Seaboard. Transmission planners and engineers say upgrades to existing lines could address reliability without a need for most new lines. The two new corridors are not exactly narrow pathways for power lines, but encompass wide swaths of 11 states. The new Mid-Atlantic power corridor, for instance, encompasses 116,000 square miles.

"The FERC cited the Hudson Valley in New York as a bottleneck for power – but that's wrong," says George Loehr, a power engineer and executive committee member of the New York State Reliability Council. "It's just that independent generating companies in upstate New York would like to be able to move more power to New York City and Long Island. That's the highest priced market and would earn them more money there. But that's not a reliability issue."

But Dominion Resources, which has proposed a 65-mile power line through the Virginia countryside narrowly skirting battlefields, has said it expects state regulators to make a positive decision on its recent application. If the company doesn't like the decision, it may now apply to FERC for review of its power-line proposal.

Some of the most heated resistance is in Virginia where the new national corridor includes 11 historic districts, one national historic landmark, 19 state or national historic sites, seven Civil War battlefields, and the Appalachian Trail. Some of the most famous sites of the Civil War – Manassas, Antietem, and Gettysburg – lie within the Mid-Atlantic corridor.

Mark Brownstein, a managing director at Environmental Defense, a New York-based environmental group, says his group is examining the possibility of a lawsuit. The new corridor border divides Appalachian coal reserves and large urban populations on the East Coast. "It seems no accident these corridors are exactly along the borders of states that have committed to reducing greenhouse gases," he says.

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