Building Out Transmission

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If there's anything approaching unanimous opinion when it comes to greater wind penetration in the nation's power grid, it might be building transmission infrastructure to access the vast wind resources in the Great Plains.

And that's one of the things Michigan-based ITC Holdings, an electric transmission company, is trying to achieve. In a recent webcast, CEO Joseph Welch, who helped create ITC in 2003 with about three dozen others from Detroit Edison, explained his vision. Currently, ITC serves an area of nearly 80,000 square miles in five states.

He's big on metaphors with the interstate highway system, and likens the United States' transmission system to having its connecting roadways owned by 500 entities, as the grid currently is.

Access to comparatively cheap wind energy is therefore limited, he said.

"The wind that is in the Dakotas is some of the best wind and it's the lowest-cost generation bar none of any generation be it coal, nuclear, gas or anything else," Welch said. "The wind in the Dakotas is of that high a quality, yet we have no road to get it here."

Kansas is another prime example, in his view, in  its lack of interstate connections and in its lack of  interconnections within its own borders. "Kansas is a big, populated state and it's one where it has vast resources again in wind and it's also not very well interconnected," he said. "Kansas, east-to-west was experiencing huge cost differentials across the state.  They needed transmission built."

There's also the issue of energy independence, which is often cited as a justification for a renewable energy build-out with transmission access as the missing link. "I really believe that this country has a true energy problem and I believe in my heart of hearts that transmission is one of the key elements to helping this country become energy independent," Welch added. 

In a future Welch would like to see, those problems will be solved with the help of companies like ITC.

"When we look at this big, vast grid that we have out here today and all of the generators and everything out here we don't want to look forward and say, `Look, we have wind blowing every day.  Why don't we harvest that?  We can harvest that every day,'" he said.

We'll see how soon that vision might turn into reality.

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