Industry leaders call for new plants, power lines

Tag : power Supplies

The aging and long-ignored infrastructure that provides power tohomes and businesses across the Mid-Atlantic region is nearing thebreaking point because of growing demand, a group of electricityexperts warned at a forum in West Virginia.
"I don't want to be an alarmist here, but the window within whichwe can act to maintain reliable power supplies is getting to betighter and tighter," said Daniel Larcamp, spokesman for the EdisonElectrical Institute, an association of publicly held electriccompanies representing about 70 percent of the U.S. industry.
Larcamp and others painted a grim picture at the conferencesponsored by West Virginians for Reliable Power on Wednesday,talking mainly about the need for upgraded power plants andtransmission lines. But they also said the region needs morealternative energy sources such as solar and wind power.
West Virginia's rapidly growing Eastern Panhandle, a haven forpeople fleeing the congestion of Baltimore and Washington, D.C.,has seen peak summer demand grow by about 4.1 percent a year in thelast decade, four times the state average, Larcamp said.
Wintertime demand has grown more than 6 percent per year, with morethan 4,200 new commercial connections, 450 new industrialconnections and more than 23,000 new residential connections in thepast decade.
West Virginia is on a grid run by electricity wholesaler PJMInterconnections, which covers parts of 13 states and the Districtof Columbia. Many transmission lines operate close to their limitsand may not be able to meet demand in as little as five years, saidPJM spokesman Robert Hinkle.
The conference comes as a new high-voltage line, thePotomac-Appalachian Transmission Highline (PATH), is underconsideration.
PATH would carry power 290 miles from a substation near St. Albans,near Charleston, W.Va., to another substation in Berkeley County.
From there, twin transmission lines would run to a substation to bebuilt in Kemptown, Md., on a path that Pennsylvania-based AlleghenyPower said has not yet been drawn.