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commentA crowd of more than 200 people packed into the Mt. Olivet United Methodist Church near Lovettsville Wednesday night to find ways to battle plans for a new electric transmission line to cross northern Loudoun.
Allegheny Energy and American Electrical Power's PATH project would bring power from West Virginia to near Frederick, MD.
The meeting was initiated by residents Bart Hodgson and Keith Lawson. Hodgson moderated the meeting, which included remarks by Piedmont Environmental Council transmission line experts Rob Marmet and Brianna West, Supervisor Sally R. Kurtz (D-Catoctin) and a representative of Rep. Frank Wolf's (R-VA-10) office, as well as questions from the audience.
The transmission line will run over an approximately 290-mile route from AEP's John E. Amos substation, built in 1971, in West Virginia to a new Kemptown substation near Frederick, MD. The 765kv line will be built on top of a 138kv line along an existing power company right of way, using poles of an average 175 feet high.
What has alarmed residents particularly is that, because of easement difficulties encountered with two properties along the right of way, the power companies are proposing a loop southward passing near Lovettsville's northern town limits to avoid those properties.
Staying informed and letting elected representatives at all levels know their opinions, attending all the power companies' open houses, checking their Web sites for the latest information and passing the word to others was the best course of action, Kurtz, Marmet and West advised.
"Keep me informed and show up Jan. 22," Kurtz told the audience. Allegheny and AEP will host a 5-8 p.m. open house on the project Jan. 22 at Lovettsville Elementary School and Kurtz urged a good attendance. A regional meeting also is planned for Jan. 24.
"This will have a tremendous impact," Kurtz said, encouraging residents to keep her informed and Del. Joe T. May (R-33) as well as Wolf's office.
"We do need to make a joint three-state case, and my job is to get the Board of Supervisors to support" a resolution for urging the companies to bury the transmission lines, Kurtz said.
"Make sure everyone knows about it, and form groups," Marmet said, noting that groups had already formed in Maryland and West Virginia. "I think you'll have a lot of friends in West Virginia," he predicted, while another resident said she had heard that Frederick County had recommended AEP go back and do a study on underground technology and other alternatives. By law, the power companies are required prove need, and consider alternatives, so that provides an opportunity for residents.
Hodgson and Lawson had met with the PEC representatives who offered to help with information and liaison with other groups in West Virginia and Maryland who also opposed the line.
The PEC representatives advised the group to "hang together" and form a united front, particularly in cooperation with other groups, if they wanted to be successful. Simply focusing their concerns on the impact the project could have on their backyards or their neighborhoods would not be successful, Marmet advised. Residents should be an advocate for the entire line, not just their property.
"That's what they want you to do," he said, noting that the power companies tend follow a policy of divide and conquer when faced with such community opposition.
But it's not just the two power companies opponents have to contend with, Market said. The bigger player is PJM, the regional transmission operation covering 10 states that is the "driving force" in determining what and where transmission lines are built. Likening the organization to an operators' club, Market said PJM was a very complex machine that can relieve reliability problems by moving many megawatts from west to east to the New York City, New Jersey and Philadelphia markets.
Coal-powered electricity from the west is so much cheaper, and it was a natural evolution for PJM to move those "stranded assets" to where they could be sold easily in the east, Marmet said.
The PATH line has a price tag of $1.8 billion, and under federal energy regulations the power companies have a 14.3 percent guaranteed rate of return on every dollar spent. It was that "bail out," as one resident commented, that enraged people, particularly as they will see no direct benefit from the line.
While PJM continues to forecast increased demand for electricity, the PEC representatives said they saw a flattening or even decline, in line with energy conservation and use of renewable sources.
Residents did have a window of opportunity to organize, West said, noting the power companies would file their application in March or April. Public hearings would not be held probably until the first part of 2010.
After residents asked a variety of questions as to what could be done, Hodgson said the group would receive further information on future plans via e-mail and that a second meeting probably would be called soon.
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Dean Settle wrote on Jan 8, 2009 9:20 PM:
Look, you'd do well to get educated. Just as banks have become deregulated and reckless, so have power utilities.
Along and about the time that power became a national commodity instead of a local one, with a whole new set of middlemen to resell it and get part of the pie...what was to follow was predictable.
There sits all that coal in Ohio at one of the dirtiest plants left running in the US today.
All of the money that would even consider purchasing that plant's output is up in densely populated NJ and NY.
What you overlooked is: Power usage is actually going down, because this power utility's projection look right over FLBs and renewable energy that's actually being sold back into the local grid up there. There is actually no need for this line.
The power that is generated all the way out in Ohio will lose 45% or more of it's core by the time it reaches it's destination. The plan to combat this?? Burn even more filthy coal to send twice as much thru so half of it actually gets there.
Stop reacting with your feelings. Use your brain and let it examine factual data. "