Environmental group unhappy with power planning
MONTPELIER, Vt. --When the Public Service Board approved a big new set of power lines to serve northwestern Vermont in January of 2005, it complained that a lack good utility planning had left it with little choice.
The quasi-judicial panel called on the Vermont Electric Power Co. and the state Department of Public Service to come up with an improved planning process that might help put off or prevent future construction similar to VELCO's Northwest Reliability Project.
That effort is nearly complete, and questions are being raised about whether the new planning process is really just more of the same.
"Why should we look at this as being a major improvement over the process we had previously?" Public Service Board member John Burke asked during a hearing this past week.
The state's utilities, including VELCO, have agreed with the DPS on a method to insure that the "least cost" option for meeting Vermont's power needs is secured.
"Given the magnitude of the challenges inherent in transmission planning, I am confident that we are creating a path that has a good opportunity to succeed and that is better than any alternative that has been considered," DPS Planning Director Riley Allen told the board.
During hearings leading up to the board's 2005 approval for the VELCO project, critics argued that the state instead should pursue more aggressive energy conservation and build one or two small power plants to serve northwestern Vermont's growing power demand.
Supporters of the Northwest Reliability Project argued, and the board eventually agreed, that there wasn't sufficient time to implement those measures.
Sandra Levine, a lawyer for the Conservation Law Foundation, said her group believes the new planning process is likely to leave the state in the same predicament in the future.
The proposal offered by the utilities and the DPS would make it impossible for "cleaner and lower-cost alternatives to compete fairly with the next big transmission project," Levine said during the hearing.
Lawyers for the DPS and for VELCO agreed that the proposed planning process would not ensure against the need for more big power lines in the future.
"Will we never ever be faced with a problem like the Northwest Reliability Project?" asked Aaron Adler of the DPS. "Nobody in this room can guarantee that," he said.
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Information from: The Times Argus, http://www.timesargus.com/
