PATH power line delayed again?
Picked up a bit of news from a blog called The Power Line, by a guy named Bill Howley in Calhoun County about American Electric Power’s PATH power line project:
Power company attorney John Philip Melick with the firm of Jackson Kelly, filed a request on February 24 to postpone PATH’s filing for a Certificate of Need with the WV PSC from March 2009 to “on or about April 1.”
Howley is also encouraging folks to oppose Gov. Joe Manchin’s power line tax, which as you recall hasn’t yet been introduced. (See What happened to Manchin’s power line tax?)
4 comments
Bill Howley’s blog is very informative and timely, he’s on the job watching this project every day. In many respects the PATH transmission line project is the pinacle of what the coal industry needs to” keep the lights on” for many years to come. I don’t believe this transmission line is compatible with renewable energy projects only dirty ones.
The enormous environmental damage (not to mention damage to personal properties for rights of way) cannot justify this project. Let’s go the alternative energy (truly clean) route instead of investing more in energy produced by coal which has, historically, affected soil, air and water adversely.
I hate to disagree with Ms. Stone, but we don’t just need more “renewables.” We need to look at our national electrical system in an entirely new way, as are people in Europe. A truly secure power grid is one where power is generated as close as possible to where it is needed, by natural gas, wind, solar or excess heat from industrial processes. Big wind farms or solar thermal plants connected by extra high voltage power lines are less destructive than coal, but they don’t really solve the problems of power conservation, grid security or wise economic investment.
One example: the best areas in the US for wind power generation are off the east and west coasts, yet AEP and other corporate power traders keep talking about shipping wind powered electricity from the middle of the US to the coasts. Why build new huge transmission lines across the US when the best sources of power are right next to the cities that need them most?
The big power companies like AEP and Allegheny Energy don’t want smaller low polluting natural gas plants near cities or off shore wind farms, because they already have huge investments in wind projects that would use the same transmission lines as their coal fired power plants.
In fact, AEP and Allegheny are showing lots of windmills in their TV ads promoting PATH and TrAIL. That should tell us all that Big Wind and Big Coal may just be two sides of the same bad coin. I want to keep this comment relatively short, but there is a lot more information about these issues on The Power Line.
This monstrosity would take a swath 200 feet wide through farms and forests and other private and public lands from one side of West Virginia to the other, and into Virginia and Maryland. As a practical matter, it is an interstate highway dedicated to the transport of coal by wire from the Ohio Valley to east coast cities.
It would take 6 or 7 new medium sized coal fired power plants to feed the beast called PATH.
And it is to be paid for by West Virgiunia utility rate payers who won’t even be using the power transported along the 18 heavy cable wires hanging from giant steel towers.
What an injustice this would be to West Virginia property owners and WV power company customers.
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