Utilities planning new power lines
Reliability to keep pace with growing demand is cited
Southern New England's two biggest utilities are developing plans to spend potentially $1 billion constructing 80 to 100 miles of high-voltage electric transmission lines to make the regional power grid more reliable and keep up with steadily growing energy demand.
The companies, National Grid USA and Northeast Utilities , are months away from presenting state regulators in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island with any proposed routes, which are almost certain to spawn local concerns over the visual impact of 100-foot-tall power pylons and questions about possible health effects. Some consumers have worried about exposure to high-voltage electric fields, though scientific studies generally have dismissed those concerns.
All seven corridors where the utilities want to upgrade transmission capacity already have power-line rights of way that are hundreds of feet wide and filled with tall towers and electric lines. But engineers still need to do months of studies before they can determine whether these rights-of-way are big enough to accommodate the additional electrical gear needed, or whether they may have to look to open new rights of way or install new lines underground.
"The main reason we need to pursue this project is to ensure the reliability of the regional grid, and this project is going to help the whole region," said Jackie Barry , a spokeswoman for National Grid USA.
The net cost to consumers is likely to be small. New England collectively pays about $9 billion annually for electricity, so paying off 30- or 40-year bonds for $1 billion in transmission upgrades could add less than 1 percent to average bills.
New England's power grid comprises nearly 8,000 miles of high-voltage lines that feed local lines. With the advent of utility restructuring in the 1990s, utilities were forced to sell their own power plants, and now utilities and their customers can shop for power competitively from plants all around New England and parts of Canada.
For the system to work, though, the power grid has to be strong and flexible enough to accommodate flows of power in all directions, not just the original generating station-to-customer routes that utilities built 50 or 100 years ago.
Just as highway bottlenecks that cause trucks to sit in traffic can drive up the cost of consumer goods, transmission bottlenecks in the power grid drive up the cost of power for New Englanders by restricting access to the lowest-cost electric sources.
As a system, officials agree, some of the major problems the grid faces are constraints on being able to move electricity among power plants and utility customers in parts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and more generally moving electricity from eastern New England to western New England. The transmission network around Springfield is also increasingly seen as a weak link in the regional grid.
To solve those problems, National Grid and Northeast Utilities envision adding 115,000- and 345,000-volt lines from Ludlow to Agawam in Massachusetts to North Bloomfield and Watertown in Connecticut, and new lines from North Smithfield, R.I. to Millbury, Mass.; to Warwick, R.I.; and to Killingly and Lebanon in Connecticut. Depending on the route, those corridors could total over 100 miles. The project has been dubbed NEEWS, for New England East-West Solution.
Ronald LeComte , chief of the electric power division for the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Energy , said Bay State officials agree some kind of major upgrade in these areas is needed.
"These are all to address system weaknesses that have been identified," LeComte said. "We understand these are needed to address reliability concerns." But LeComte said state officials can't comment on the likely public impact, because "we just haven't seen any routes yet."
"Nothing is in stone yet," said Ken McDonnell , a spokesman for Independent System Operator New England , the Holyoke organization that runs the six-state power grid and wholesale electric markets and has spent two years studying and endorsing the need for electric upgrades in the areas the utilities are proposing. "Any plans you may see at this point are very preliminary," McDonnell said.
For years, US Energy Department and regional electric officials have been warning that New England needs to upgrade its power grid. With new financial incentives provided by the 2005 national energy bill, however, several projects are getting underway, including Northeast Utilities' 69-mile transmission line from Middletown to Norwalk in southwestern Connecticut and NStar Electric's 18-mile line from Stoughton to South Boston.
Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com. 
