Electric-transmission owners and constructors are hopeful that the National Electric Transmission Congestion Study will jumpstart expansion of the grid, asserting that it has suffered from under-investment for 30 years. But at least one observer expects local opposition to continue to hinder new transmission construction.

The U.S. Dept. of Energy study, published Aug. 8, identified Southern California and the Atlantic Coast, from New York City to northern Virginia, as “critical congestion areas” for electricity transmission. DOE will accept public comment until Oct. 10, gathering input on where stakeholders believe “national interest electric transmission corridors” should be located. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman is expected to designate those corridors by year’s end. Click here to view map

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 authorized the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to issue construction permits for transmission projects in these corridors under specified conditions if a project faces excessive barriers.

John Colson, president and chief operating officer of Houston-based Quanta Services, believes provisions in the act will provide incentives for investment and shave years off projects. “If you give a developer an idea of when construction can start, [you have] a better opportunity to get investors to invest money,” he says.

But building new lines will remain difficult, says Dean Oskvig, president and CEO of B&V Energy, Overland Park, Kan. “The study itself does not resolve that difficulty. What it does is confirm the priority of things—where [the process] is going to have the biggest near-term payoff, what’s going to be the longer-term payoff,” he says. “You still have to deal with the regulatory and political realities to get the solution to implement. This report does not fix that.”

Initial corridor designations likely will be made in the areas deemed “critical” by the report, but DOE will consider extending the label to other areas, says Kevin Kolevar, director of DOE’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. The study designated other regions as “congestion areas of concern” and “conditional congestion areas.”

New projects on private lands will still be subject to state regulators and property owners. But Colson believes it will be easier to get land owners to agree to projects once the first line is built, especially since the transmission would be confined to the corridors.

Prudential Equity Group analyst James Lucier says multi-agency teamwork should help avoid the “chicken-and-egg” problem, in which “projects can’t get started because there is no federal siting assistance, but you can’t get federal siting assistance because the project still lacks critical mass.”

The study’s “critical” label for the Atlantic region came as good news to the PJM Interconnection, a transmission coalition of 13 states and the District of Columbia. Earlier this year PJM requested that two corridors be designated to facilitate projects that will carry electricity generated in coal-rich western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio to the cities of New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

PJM President and CEO Phil Harris  is optimistic that gaining necessary rights-of-way will be easier, once the public sees the DOE process as open with significant attention given to projects, alternatives and data. “People will understand that there is a national need as opposed to just a local concern,” says Harris. PJM is now evaluating 10 transmission line proposals valued at $10 billion to meet needs through 2021.