New England govs agree on regional energy vision
MONTPELIER, Vt. -- New England's governors have endorsed a plan calling for up to a third of the region's electric power to come from wind by 2030, possibly with a big new network of high-voltage transmission lines to move the energy from source to market.
At a conference with eastern Canadian provincial premiers that ended Tuesday in St. John, New Brunswick, the governors endorsed a blueprint for the region's energy future based on suggestions from ISO New England, the regional power dispatch agency.
A draft of ISO's New England 2030 Power System Study, which officials are calling conceptual and far from cast in stone, describes extensive wind power development both inland and offshore.
New England's effort to get its act together on renewable energy development has been given new impetus recently by a plan in the works among Midwestern states to significantly expand wind power and other renewable sources and try to sell excess power to the Northeast, said Maine Governor John Baldacci.
"We think we have the resources and wherewithal to do this," Baldacci, a Democrat who chairs the New England Governors' Conference, said in a phone interview Wednesday.
"And frankly we were kind of taken aback by the fact that the Midwest governors and businesses are looking to develop wind power there and then feed a DC (direct-current) line to the Northeast, negating all of our renewable energy projects and putting all of our potential economic development frankly out to sea."
But while last month's announcement from the Midwestern states and utilities may have provided some fresh motivation, ISO-New England has been working for months to draft its recommendations, the Holyoke, Mass.-based agency's chief executive, Gordon van Welie, said Wednesday.
"The analysis clearly shows New England has the potential for developing renewable energy sources in the region and for expanding trade with our immediate neighbors," van Welie said.
"Most of this renewable energy that we were looking at tends to be wind power, and that will require transmission investment in order to integrate it onto the grid," he said.
Van Welie was quick to add that the ISO study's contents were merely suggestions; it will be up to utilities, governors, legislatures and public utility commissions in the six-state region to make final decisions about how much renewable energy to pursue.
Both Welie and Baldacci said there was another reason to avoid big new power supplies from the Midwest: Wind power relies on other power sources to back it up when the wind doesn't blow, and the biggest source of that steadily flowing, "baseload" power in the Midwest is coal-fired power plants.
That would defeat a major purpose in the push for renewables: reducing the carbon emissions that are tied to global climate change.
Instead, New England is looking to Canada, which has abundant hydroelectric power, to fill in the gaps around wind.
But moving power even from Quebec and the Maritime provinces -- or from the windy parts of New England and its offshore waters to population centers -- will require new transmission lines, the ISO said in its report.
Some of the maps contained within it show a loop extending from near Waterbury, Conn., to far northern Maine of 500 or 765 kilovolt transmission lines, which would be the largest ever built in the region. Environmental groups have opposed many past power line projects.
Welie said that siting such projects would be years away.
"Ultimately I think that we just don't know at this point what's going to be built and what's not going to be built," he said.
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