Power grid bottleneck stalls Maine project

Tag : small wind generator

MILLINOCKET, Maine— A gridlocked New England power grid in Maine has stalled aHarpswell developer's plan for a $50 million biomass boiler inMillinocket.
Jerry Tudan, of Peregrine Technologies, had already lined upfinancing for the 17-megawatt project that would bring 45 jobs tothe Katahdin region when he got the bad news from the grid manager.
Tudan said his company sought to register the site with ISO-NewEngland, only to be told that a northern Maine wind farm projecthad registered earlier and had "maxed out" any available access tothe grid at this time.
Tudan has no quarrel with First Wind, the Massachusetts developerof Stetson Mountain and other wind projects in northern Maine. Buthe said that company is among several that have queued up for somuch space on the grid in coming years that no one else can fit.
"There's no bitter tears here toward First Wind about it," Tudansaid. "That's the marketplace, though I feel very bad about how itwent because we had a beautiful project."
ISO-New England manages the transmission of electricity through the45-, 115- and 345-kilovolt lines connecting various power companysystems. It's open, on a first-come, first-served basis, togenerators that meet reliability standards.
Three of Maine's largest utilities -- Bangor Hydro-Electric Co.,Central Maine Power and Maine Public Service -- have plans to laynew lines, but none will likely materialize before 2011, at theearliest.
"More power generators could come on the grid now, but there is acertain amount of congestion between Maine and southern NewEngland," said CMP spokesman John Carroll, who agreed that the NewEngland grid is getting gridlocked. "Therefore, there are somelimited periods of time where they would not be able to run becausetheir power couldn't be transferred out of Maine."
To boost capacity, several large-scale grid expansions are in theworks, including a CMP 345-kilovolt line that would run nearly 250miles from Orrington to Eliot and New Hampshire. It would go online by 2012 and cost $1.1 billion to $1.5 billion.
Bangor Hydro has proposed a project which would use 345-kilovoltlines to connect its Orrington substation to the Boston area, at anestimated cost of $2 billion.
"Ultimately ISO-New England or the system's operator-owners willexpand the system, but not for a single generator, because the ruleis that generators pay to get interconnected to the system," saidGerry Chasse, vice president of transmission and distributionoperations at Bangor Hydro.
"To say that any one generator has taken up all capacity is alittle inaccurate," Chasse said. "New generators are already cominginto an already-constrained system in that there isn't sufficientcapacity to carry energy to the market under all conditions."
Town Manager Eugene Conlogue had welcomed the biomass project. Heexpressed disappointment, but not surprise, that it is likely dead.Power generation, Conlogue said, is "one of our growth areas inMillinocket, but if they don't have a way to get power to the grid,it's a dead issue."
------
Information from: Bangor Daily News, http:// www.bangornews.com