Gene Wolf

The Reality of Transmission

Special Issue By: Gene Wolf Volume A Number 1

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Gene Wolf is principal, Lone Wolf Engineering and Chairman, IEEE Power Energy Society Transmission and Distribution Committee He is a technical writer for Transmission & Distribution World magazine. He is widely recognized as a technical leader in the electric power industry.

I have a feeling that Edison and Westinghouse would be very comfortable walking into the majority of control houses today, when they see all the electrical and mechanical relays that are still around.

We've got this fantastic grid that was the best engineering achievement of the 20th century. Here we are in the 21st century, and we're still living with that. We have this system that is costly, complex and critical to our nation's economy, but it was primarily built back in the —€˜50s and —€˜60s.

About 60 percent of that grid will have to be replaced in the next 10 to 20 years. That's unrelated to new transmission that needs to be added. We have roughly a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure, so that's $600 billion of infrastructure that has to be replaced.

It's not hard to find a transformer that's 40 years old. That's pretty much the average of transformers on our system. I'm not talking about the pole-mounted transformers. General Electric estimates 100,000 medium- and large-size power transformers. One insurance company estimates that we can expect a 1 to 1.5 percent failure rate each year.

That's 1,000 to 1,500 transformers. If one of the large transformers serving Albuquerque were to fail, it will take two years to get a replacement. And a large transformer can cost $3 million to $5 million.

A lot of utilities have been cutting away at their system reliability for a number of years, trying to keep the rates low and get along with regulators and customers, and they haven't added facilities, so guess what? If you lose the wrong distribution transformer, you might have a neighborhood out of electricity for a long time.

Now 70 percent of the transmission lines are over 25 years old. Same thing goes with our generating plants. I worked for Public Service Company of New Mexico for 28 years; I was the principal engineer of stations. We always talked about the new generation, the San Juan power plant, the Palo Verde plant. That new generation was built back in the —€˜70s. Our infrastructure all over the country is old.

And speaking of old, the EEI and IEEE have found that 50 percent of workers are scheduled to retire in the next ten years. Most utilities aren't paying much attention to that fact. The ones that do have a plan, it's usually to hire the retired.

In the last 15 years, engineering school enrollment has dropped about 50 percent nationwide. A lot of people are calling that "The Perfect Storm," but it's a transition period. That's part of what the intelligent grid is all about. We're going to be doing things much differently because technology is taking over.

Getting back to transmission lines, there aren't any silver bullets. We estimate 40 percent growth between now and 2030 and $1.1 trillion will be for transmission and distribution. The rest is generation. Take that amount and add $600 billion for replacing infrastructure, and you're starting to talk real money. What we're trying to do right now is take what we have and make it work better, hence the intelligent grid. We're putting a lot of sensors and new equipment out there.

There's a lot of 765 kilovolt transmission line that utilities want to build. Unfortunately, when you try to build a transmission line in North America, it's going to take, if everything works out, about seven years. That's from the time you start your siting process until you actually put that transmission line into operation. And when you build transmission, you affect the rest of the grid. We have a phenomenon on the eastern and western grids called "unscheduled flow of power," or "loop flow." If you want to move power from Arizona into New Mexico, it may go through California, Idaho and Utah first. We can't push AC the way marketers want it to go.

We need a history lesson here. About 1892 we started developing distribution. We had a generator and customers pretty close together. They got a bright idea: There's another generator a couple miles away. If we run some conductor between the two, we can back each other up and improve reliability. Then they started making these systems more dependent and helpful to each other. We started building transmission to our plants. In New Mexico, the major generation is in the northwestern part of the state and the major load center is here in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. We have that system repeated all over the country.

Now we're trying to use the system to bring power from point A to point B, and it wasn't designed that way. We're trying to push electricity through wire the way we might push water through pipe, but you can't store electricity the way you can store water. Electricity might want to go through points X, Y, and Z before it gets to point B. In each part of the system it moves through, you have losses—€”a little bit less electricity at the end. We're trying to fix that.

We need to build more transmission. Unfortunately, you don't just build transmission. When the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission began deregulation, it came up with a queue system. If you, as an interconnector, go to your utility, you have to get into the queue. It can take years. In the Midwest, if they stopped right now and worked on everything in the queue, it would take them until 2055 to get all those jobs done. In New Mexico, it's about three years. In California, it's closer to five years.

So if you want to build a wind farm in eastern New Mexico, you go to the utility that serves that area and pay a fee. When you get to the head of the queue, they will run feasibility and system studies to learn what will happen when you connect to their system.

Everything takes time. So now you've been through three years of waiting to get to the front of the line, another year or two of system studies, and then you have to order the equipment. That's just one of the aspects of building transmission.

We need a national policy. We may talk about President Eisenhower with his four-lane highways, but today's reality is it's a local issue. Everybody here knows about NIMBY, "not in my back yard." NIMBY has morphed into BANANA, "build absolutely nothing near anybody." And in some parts of the country, it's become NOPE, "not on planet earth."

I've worked on both sides of this equation. For over 30 years, I was a utility engineer and now I'm a consulting engineer, but I still see the same kinds of problems. Somebody earlier said you work with these groups until somebody says no. I haven't seen any of these groups say no. That's too easy. They form coalitions and say, "Let's study." And they study the problem until it just doesn't go anywhere. California wants to start putting renewables at the head of the queue.

I've been involved with a transmission line that was studied for almost 15 years; the utilities spent millions of dollars, and it never got built. That same story is repeated around the country. We just have to do something on a national scale, such as the interstate.

American Electric Power wants to build a 765 kilovolt transmission line in Ohio and down into New Mexico. California wants to start adding more renewables. And Southern Cal Edison has a project right now to put 250 megawatts of photovoltaic on flat roofs in Los Angeles. But they all have to do studies.

All these different projects and technologies are still facing the same bottom line: You can only push electric power so far over a transmission system. There are five grids in North America: Hydro-Quebec, the eastern grid, the western grid, ERCOT (the Texas grid), and Mexico.

Some people have been working on an idea to break up the western and eastern grids and make them smaller. If you break up each grid, interconnect it with back-to-back converter stations, and bring in DC transmission from these operating sections to the other operating sections, you get a much more reliable system.

The Electric Power Research Institute has a project called the Grid Shock Absorber. The cost is $8 billion to $12 billion to break up the grids and put in DC facilities. But during the outage of August 2003, we lost 50 million people in the Northeast. Hydro-Quebec, which is connected to the northern grid, was not affected one bit. So it kind of proves EPRI's point that this will help stabilize the system.