Alternative Energy Still Facing Headwinds

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Obama Signs $787 Billion Stimulus Bill

President Obama signed into law a $787 billion economic stimulus plan called the 'American Recovery and Reinvestment Act' Tuesday at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, a setting intended to underscore the new law's role in creating clean-energy jobs. Video by AP

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But 15 months after winning approval from two Kansas regulatory boards and paying right-of-way fees to two rural electric cooperatives, the project proposed by ITC Holdings is bogged down. Another company, Prairie Winds, is now pushing a rival proposal.

"It's very frustrating," said Joseph L. Welch, chief executive of ITC Holdings, whose 15,000 miles of power lines make it the nation's sixth-largest transmission system. "We'll probably spend as much on attorneys as we will on that line. . . . We're mired down in a process and I, for the life of me, don't understand it."

Welch hopes federal intervention and the political oomph of the stimulus package will make a difference. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 gave FERC the power to cut through layers of bureaucracy, but the effects have been limited. On Monday, ITC asked FERC to approve revenue and incentive plans for a new Green Power Express network of lines that would link wind-abundant areas of the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa to the cities and factories of the Midwest.

"We can't just turn it on like a switch," Welch said. "If we can streamline the process and come up with a stimulus package that really helps, we can do things that will help get this country moving."

The national electricity grid is "the biggest, most complex machine on Earth," said Amory B. Lovins, chief executive of the Rocky Mountain Institute. It is also antiquated and largely unable to connect with places where renewable power supplies are plentiful.

The Electricity Advisory Committee last month called the grid "a hodgepodge of individual and regional systems, costing consumers billions of dollars in congestion annually" and limiting the ability to transmit renewable energy.

For now, there is no alternative to the grid, which poses a problem for utilities as states across the country require them to add increasing amounts of renewable energy to their mix.

"That's a tremendous opportunity for us to develop our resources and send them to Arizona and California," said New Mexico Energy Secretary Joanna Prukop. "What we don't have is adequate transmission to move that around the state or export it."

Power lines are essential not only to deliver renewable fuel but also to guarantee a steady electricity supply because the sun does not shine on schedule, nor does the wind blow steadily.

Prukop described a proposed power line called the High Plains Express that would deliver half its energy from wind power by weaving together projects in New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. New Mexico is prepared to help make that happen by financing and building transmission lines that would carry at least 30 percent renewable power.

Wyoming is trying a different approach, acting as a broker for wind power firms that want to sell electricity to more populous Colorado. If enough companies sign up, the line will be built, but tight credit markets have made its fate unclear.

"There are transmission plans that are just plans on paper throughout the upper Midwest, upper and lower Great Plains and interior Midwest. They just don't move forward, mainly because of the cost allocation," said Robert Gramlich, policy adviser to the American Wind Energy Association.