Jon Wellinghoff, Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), addressed a crowd of students, lawyers, and industry professionals at American University’s Washington College of Law this past Thursday.  Focusing on our electrical infrastructure’s role in deploying renewable energy, Chairman Wellinghoff argued that delivering renewables to our load centers gives our energy grid a whole new purpose in the 21st century.

Transmission and siting were the focal point of Chairman Wellinghoff’s address.  And for good reason.  After the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct), the responsibility to maintain the reliability of our electrical grid fell to FERC.  With an aging electrical infrastructure and heightened concern over carbon emissions, more states are making an aggressive push to upgrade generation by bringing renewable energy online.  Although renewable energy is a distributed resource, there are areas of the country where renewables are highly concentrated and more reliable, such as the sunshine of the Southwest or the wind off the Atlantic coast.  How can we bring such renewable potential to the masses?  Only by building out new transmission lines.

Such lines are not easy to acquire.  For one, siting lines takes time and a lot of coordination.  States tend to control where power lines can be sited, and in some areas of the country it is even determined by county.  When we’re talking running a transmission line from the wind belts of Wyoming down to Las Vegas, this can quickly turn into a planning nightmare.  In order to have a more cohesive approach to building out our renewables capacity, Chairman Wellinghoff called for “some expanded federal siting authority” to be put in place.  He was very careful, however, to point out that such federal authority should be limited and that states should have a central planning role.  In this scenario, overarching goals for how to best bring renewable energy to populated centers would materialize at the federal level, and the planning, siting, and cost allocation would occur at the state level by a pre-determined deadline.

Second, there is the issue of cost.  Who will pay for such lines?  There is an escalating debate in the energy world between those who believe that only beneficiaries of a line should pay and those who argue that socialized payment is the best route.  Where this becomes tricky is in identifying exactly who the beneficiaries are, given that an entire region may benefit from the cleaner electricity even though it is only fed to half the population.  This conflict over cost allocation has been gaining more and more attention as the transmission debate unfolds.  It will be interesting to follow who pays for which lines as our transmission and distribution system is built out.

Upgrading the transmission of electricity on our grid is key to scaling renewables.  Check out our previous post on why our grid is inadequate to learn more.  At GetSolar, we’ll be sure to keep you updated on how the grid begins to change as new transmission lines are laid to scale renewable energy nationwide.