WASHINGTON

A study of U.S. electricity transmission needs, done by an expert team under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), should be released roughly as this issue goes to press and will be available online [see "To Probe Further," below]. Organized like DOE's Post-Outage Study Team (POST), which examined the summer 1999 power failures [see "Restructuring the Thin-Stretched Grid," IEEE Spectrum, June 2000, pp. 43-49], the National Transmission Grid Study was launched last August but got going in earnest only after 11 September.

Because of the attacks, the three public hearings held around the country in late September may have been less eagerly attended than hoped, and participants may have been distracted. Certainly, infrastructure security moved higher up the agenda, and transmission congestion may not have come in for quite the priority concern expected.

In any event, the study team did its final work at a time when other key authorities were sounding many alarms about transmission. The North American Electric Reliability Council, the power industry's self-regulation organization based in Princeton, N.J., has said the nation "is at a crisis stage with respect to the reliability of transmission grids." In short, transmission lines in many parts of the United States are in danger of becoming overloaded and failing.

Issues other than reliability matter, too. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), already more aggressive under its new activist chairman and Bush confidant Pat Wood, issued a preliminary Transmission Constraint Study on 19 December. Chokepoints identified in the document increase costs to customers as well as undermining system reliability.

Focusing on events of the summers of 2000 and 2001, the FERC study group sought to evaluate effects of congestion—more current trying to pass a point in the transmission system than that point can handle—to demonstrate costs to consumers and stir policy discussion.

Congestion costs were calculated by looking at the uncongested and congested sides of transmission choke points, multiplying the price difference by the energy transmitted across the bottleneck, and adding the cost of the extra energy produced on the congested side to replace whatever was blocked by the bottleneck. The FERC group then listed and aggregated those costs [see table below].

The conclusion: congestion had cost consumers an extra US $1 billion and more during those two summers alone. Fixing 16 bottlenecks by adding transmission would cost $12.6 billion, in the group's estimate, but the upgrade would pay for itself in just a few years. Extra fees to consumers to pay for upgrades would be almost imperceptible in monthly bills.

Also in December, but separately, the power industry's Edison Electric Institute (EEI), Washington, D.C., issued transmission-related studies drawing attention to several key issues and issue areas. Winning local, state, and federal approvals was found to be the biggest single obstacle to adding transmission capacity. Transmission in the western United States was found to be especially wanting.

In testimony to Congress on 10 October, EEI had said, "Annual investment in transmission has been declining by almost $120 million a year for the past 25 years. ...in 1999 [it] was less than half of what it had been 20 years earlier."