Antiquated Power Lines Add to Energy Woes
An antiquated and overworked system of electric transmission lines could leave much of California starved for power even if the state can eventually generate and import enough electricity to serve its 34 million residents.
The 26,000-mile-long system--enough wire to circle Earth--has long been neglected, a victim of poor planning, unexpected growth in electricity consumption and regulations that make the lines a poor investment from the standpoint of the big utilities.
The long-distance transmission lines, strung on 150-foot-tall steel towers spaced at quarter-mile intervals, face particularly strong local opposition. Citizen protests have also stalled plans to build power plants, but outrage soars when it comes to the high-voltage wires, which many associate with radiation-related health hazards.
“It’s difficult to build a power plant, but often more difficult to build a transmission line,” said Bob Therkelsen, deputy director for facilities siting at the California Energy Commission.
The problem has deep roots. In the early part of the 20th century, there was no electricity grid: Each utility was self-sufficient. But by the 1920s, utilities and states were connecting their systems to form a sort of mutual-aid society in the event of outages or natural calamities.
As utilities have been deregulated, more and more electricity is bought, sold and delivered as a commodity over ever-increasing distances and from state to state. That has put an unanticipated strain on transmission systems that were initially designed to be self-contained.
As with California’s shortage of power generation, its transmission woes are a simple case of energy demand having outpaced the infrastructure to supply it. Electricity use in the last decade has grown twice as fast as new transmission capacity.
More Troubles on the Horizon
The problem could get much worse in the next decade, because the state is planning to boost generation capacity by 25%, but it is expanding transmission capacity only by about 5%.
Two weeks ago, the transmission crunch came to a head in unprecedented rolling blackouts, which brought the energy crisis home to hundreds of thousands of residents and businesses in the northern and central parts of the state.
A principal culprit in the Jan. 17 and 18 blackouts was a relatively short segment of the statewide power grid called Path 15, a 90-mile link between the Central Valley towns of Los Banos and Coalinga where capacity problems imperiled the entire state system.
It is at that point that the Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison systems connect.
Like a two-lane freeway tunnel suddenly taking on three lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic at rush hour, Path 15 has proved inadequate to the task of delivering electricity from occasionally electron-rich Southern California to electron-starved Northern California.
There are other weak points in the grid that would require hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and up to five years’ lead time to repair. Concerns are focused on San Diego County, the San Francisco Bay Area and California’s “interconnects” with Arizona and Oregon.
How is it that a state at the vanguard of the technology revolution, itself the sixth-largest economy in the world, has developed such an Achilles’ heel?
The answer lies in a tangle of factors:
* The major utilities, elected officials and other architects of California’s now-discredited deregulation plan failed to anticipate sharp growth in electricity demand.
* Expansion has been discouraged in part because regulations deny utilities an adequate return on investment in transmission lines, said Karl Stahlkopf, vice president at the Electric Power Research Institute, a Palo Alto think tank.
Because electricity is an interstate commodity, grid operations are overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which restricts the profit that utilities make on new transmission projects to an annual average of 9% on investment. Such returns pale in comparison with the 15% to 20% utilities can earn on other, unregulated investments.
* A dry fall and winter have caused a precipitous drop in hydroelectric generation in the Pacific Northwest, normally a source of power for California. That has forced Northern California to import electricity from the southern half of the state, exposing the bottleneck at Path 15.
The state’s problems are just the most vivid symptoms of an issue that seems to have crept up on an entire nation.
Experts including Stahlkopf cite studies that have pegged the cost of lost U.S. productivity from power outages and related problems at $100 billion a year. Jack Kyser, chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., estimates that the outages of the last two weeks have cost California $2.3 billion in production cutbacks and lost wages.
Building more transmission capacity would be easier, proponents say, if there were a regional or federal authority that could exercise eminent domain siting powers.
Builders of natural gas pipelines, for example, have such an authority in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But where the commission has rate-setting authority over power transmission, it lacks siting powers for lines.
Timothy Gallagher, manager of technical services at the North American Electric Reliability Council in Princeton, N.J., said new power plants are only part of the solution to California’s electricity shortage.
“An influx of new generation capacity isn’t enough if transmission isn’t built along with it,” Gallagher said. “There are only so many locations where you can get all the air-quality [and other] environmental permits for power plants and still be in a viable place for all those transmission lines that you need to serve the system.”
Others say technology holds the key, as researchers seek ways to squeeze more electricity out of existing transmission. Stahlkopf of the Electric Power Research Institute said innovations in increasing the stability and thermal limits of transmission lines, undergoing testing in Oregon and Arizona, hold great promise. But up to now utilities have had little incentive to pursue them because of the limited investment returns, he said.
Whatever the causes and possible solutions, most agree that traffic jams along these electricity highways will become more frequent and problematic.
Population growth, in the absence of meaningful conservation, will add to demand growth.
On the supply side of the transmission imbalance, the numerous jurisdictions that the wires must cross, and the shrinking availability of suitable open space, will make it that much more difficult to upgrade or expand the existing statewide grid.
Moreover, most of the new power plants that have been approved or are under review are in the southern part of the state, which means the north-south bottleneck could grow tighter, said State Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco).
“It needs some upgrading, because if we’re building new power plants in Kern County, you have to be able to move the power to where it’s needed in Northern California,” said Burton, who floated the idea of the state buying the transmission system from the debt-ridden utilities before it ran into opposition from Republicans and many Democrats.
Consumer groups such as the Utility Reform Network in San Francisco say expansion could be facilitated if the state were to buy the grid from the utilities. That would free grid upgrades from the investment strictures of federal oversight and take advantage of the state’s lower cost of borrowing.
But however they are financed, any new lines are sure to generate heated public debate.
An example of the acrimony that surrounds transmission projects can be found in northern San Diego County, where San Diego Gas & Electric has been pushing since August for a 30-mile high-voltage link to Edison’s grid in Riverside County. SDG&E; says its customers in San Diego County and southern Orange County could face outages as early as 2004 unless the connection is built.
“You need the generation and the electric transmission, and the two have to go together,” said SDG&E; Chairman Edwin Guiles.
Guiles said the clock is ticking on the three- to four-year lead time needed to put the so-called Valley-Rainbow Interconnect into service.
But the project faces opposition from residents in the increasingly developed Temecula area. The towers and wires--engineers prefer to call them “conductors”--would require condemnation of surrounding property and would almost certainly lower real estate values.
The watchdog group Utility Consumers Action Network deems the interconnect unnecessary and contends that SDG&E; should study alternatives.
PG&E; Is Looking at Path 15 Expansion
To the north, PG&E; is somewhat reluctantly considering an expansion of the troubled Path 15.
The San Francisco-based utility owns the two 500,000-volt lines in the link but is awaiting a feasibility study before expanding capacity with a third. The study is being conducted by the Independent System Operator, the nonprofit state corporation that maintains reliability along three-quarters of the statewide grid.
The utility is hesitant to commit to the project--which would cost at least $200 million and take up to four years to complete--because it has been only during the last few months that such an expansion seemed necessary, executives say. PG&E; would build the expansion and then charge ratepayers for it over time, pending regulatory approval.
Armando Perez, the Independent System Operator’s director of grid planning, said the Bay Area is another weak point in the state grid, noting that a major new line will be needed there by 2004.
The area’s vulnerability came to the fore June 14, when neighborhoods suffered rolling outages in what was the first overt evidence of a statewide power crunch that has deepened in the months since.
“That’s where the red flags are going up. There are quite a few new generation plants coming online, and when that power becomes available in the next couple of years, we’ll be seeing the effect on the grid,” Therkelsen of the Energy Commission said. “It’s critical for the state to start looking at long-term transmission needs.”
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Times staff writer Nancy Vogel contributed to this report.
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Wires 101
* Transmission wires are typically 1- or 1 1/2-inch-thick cables strung in sets of three. They hang from 150-foot-high steel towers built with so-called lattice design and are spaced a quarter-mile apart. The high-tension wires can deliver 500 to 2,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve 500,000 to 2 million typical homes.
* Cables are generally made of steel and aluminum, not copper, because of cost and weight constraints.
* The cables are strung from towers because the installation is one-third to one-tenth of the cost of laying them underground.
* Utilities have been able to add to the capacity of the lines by “reconductoring” them, meaning replacing half-inch- or 1-inch-diameter lines with thicker cables.The replacement is much more economical and speedy than building a new pathway.
* The state’s towers, and the porcelain insulators from which the cables hang--are designed to carry only so much weight, and the state’s grid is approaching its maximum capacity.
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The California Grid
Electricity is moved throughout the state on a 26,000-mile network of power lines carrying current at up to 500,000 volts. The electricity is “stepped down” in a series of substations and transformers for different levels of use in industry and in homes. New transmission lines often face opposition. One example is a proposal to link a San Diego Gas & Electric substation in northern San Diego County to an Edison substation in Riverside County. Temecula residents don’t want the lines cutting through their area.
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Sources: California Energy Commission, California Independent System Operator *
Researched by NONA YATES/Los Angeles Times
