September 8, 2003—Regulatory certainty for transmission siting and cost recovery is needed if Americas electrical grid is to be improved, the head of one of the nations largest utilities told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in testimony recently.
E. Linn Draper Jr., chairman, president and chief executive officer of American Electric Power, also told the committee that communications between transmission grid operators must be improved and that the U.S. needs to resolve the continuing debate about regional transmission organizations.
Draper, who was among the witnesses testifying on the second day of a two-day full committee hearing titled “Blackout 2003: How Did It Happen and Why?”, didnt speculate on the cause of the Aug. 14 blackout, preferring to wait for the results of the investigation by the Department of Energy and the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC).
AEP owns the nations largest transmission grid with 39,000 miles of transmission line in 11 states. AEPs 2,100 miles of extremely high voltage 765-kilovolt (kV) transmission lines is considered by many to be the backbone of the Eastern Interconnection.
Had AEPs automated controls not responded as they did, equipment could have been damaged and kept out of service for an extended time, “further burdening other lines that are, as we all know, already stressed,” Draper said. He also noted that the action by the automated controls to isolate AEPs transmission system from the blackout likely “avoided cascading outages across the AEP system and probably far beyond, given the central role of AEPs transmission grid in the Eastern Interconnection.”
Draper noted the dramatic—and rapid—change in use of the nations transmission grid. “The electrical grid in this country was designed in large part to get a local utilitys generation to its customers—not to carry thousands of cross-country and regional transactions, as the grid is now called on to do,” Draper said. “In the five-year period during which wholesale electric competition first gained momentum, the number of wholesale transactions in the U.S. went from 25,000 to 2 million—an 80-fold increase.
Draper outlined factors that would hasten grid improvement:
- Creating regulatory certainty for transmission siting and cost recovery.
- Improving coordination and communication among entities that oversee the grid.
- Resolving the debate over the role of regional transmission organizations (RTOs).
- Building consensus on an appropriate use of the grid.
- Enforcing mandatory reliability standards.
For more information, contact American Electric Power at 614/716-1120.
