At the Front Line of Power

Kelly Sullivan was one of the first female students at Virginia Military Institute. Now she's a Pepco manager.

Pepco project manager Kelly Sullivan, right, tours a work site in Prince George's County with Harry "Tex" Ritter and Jay Brooks. (By Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)

It's 7:30 a.m. In an office trailer in Prince George's County, Pepco engineer Kelly Sullivan, 27, studies a dog-eared notebook as a dozen co-workers trade jokes about the doughnuts and coffee. Pen and yellow marker in hand, she runs through the list of things she has to keep track of to coordinate the installation of a 5.6-mile high-voltage underground transmission line designed to feed more power, and more reliable power, to downtown Washington.

There are permits to be obtained from the county, buried pipes to identify, steel plates to cover up trenches dug in roads, 120,000 gallons of oil to bring in from Baltimore and drawings to complete. There's a complaint from one (but only one, she notes) of the 50 homeowners along the transmission line's path, and a delay in the arrival of some equipment, which was vandalized in another state. There are trees to trim and some reminders about safety: A week earlier, a subcontractor with a backhoe hit an existing electrical line and briefly sent flames roaring into the air.

The team Sullivan is coordinating on this chilly fall morning is made up entirely of men, and most of them are roughly twice her age -- like amiable special projects manager Walter "Skip" Newcomb, engineer Roger Cheek and veteran field technician Harry "Tex" Ritter, a tattoo visible on his neck.

But for Sullivan, this is easy compared with surviving the push-ups, the taunts of upperclassmen and the disciplinary "rat line" that she endured at Virginia Military Institute as a member of the first class with women in the school's 157-year history.

"When I realized that they had given me this project [at Pepco], I was a little afraid that I was going to encounter some folks who were a little hostile," Sullivan says, worried more because of her youth than her sex. But her rapport with them is easy, and she seems to command their respect.

"She's good at relating to people like me down here," Ritter says, "and then she can go downtown and sit at the wooden table."

Downtown at the wooden tables is where this project was hatched. A combination of growth in the heart of the District and the potential loss of a key generating station in Virginia led to the decision to add a new transmission line. If something happened to the existing line, Pepco might not have the backup needed to power downtown, including parts of the federal government.

So the company is trying to build this new 69-kilovolt transmission line in just 18 months, less than half the time it would normally take for such a project. That means designing and building at the same time. Most of the route runs under existing power lines on land where Pepco already has the right of way; a relatively small section runs through some private yards, and other parts run under national park land and into the Blue Plains sewage treatment plant. "This gives us another avenue for bringing power into the D.C. area," Sullivan says.

It is the sort of project that may be launched more often in the years ahead. According to the North American Electric Reliability Council, U.S. demand for electricity is expected to increase by 19 percent over the next 10 years, but the expansion planned in that time would increase total transmission miles less than 7 percent. "Without expanded transmission system investment, grid congestion will increase, making it more difficult for available supply to meet demands," the council said in a report issued Oct. 16. "In some situations, this can lead to supply shortages and involuntary customer interruption."

In the Washington region, as in much of the United States, a significant portion of the electrical power infrastructure needs upgrading. "The infrastructure in and around the nation is over 30 or 40 years old," Sullivan says. Moreover, as much as two-thirds of the electricity generated by power plants is lost along transmission lines; some cable-making companies are trying to develop lines that would be more efficient.

While the relatively modest-size line Sullivan is working on is expected to cost $70 million, Pepco wants to build within the next five to 10 years a $1.2 billion, 230-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line that would run from northern Virginia to New Jersey. It is one of three major transmission lines that have been proposed in the past year for the mid-Atlantic and Appalachian region.

That could mean a lot of change in an industry that is not known for innovation, and that would mean that companies such as Pepco will need more creative and energetic up-and-coming middle managers like Kelly Sullivan.