Utilities give look to power delivery

— Plains & Eastern Clean Line, an affiliate of Clean Line Energy Partners of Houston, is negotiating with Arkansas electric utilities to deliver electricity to them from wind farms in western Oklahoma, a company official said.

Clean Line filed a case with the Arkansas Public Service Commission in 2010 seeking to become a public utility in the state. But the commission in January 2011 declined to grant the company public utility status to run its high-voltage lines through Arkansas because it had no plans to serve Arkansas customers.

Clean Line recently completed a series of eight community meetings to gauge reaction from Arkansans about its proposed 300-mile transmission line through north Arkansas.

The informal meetings, held in Van Buren, Clarksville, Russellville, Greenbrier, Searcy, Newport, Marked Tree and Osceola, attracted about 250 people, said Mario Hurtado, executive vice president for development with Clean Line. The meetings ran from mid-Novem- ber through Monday.

The proposed route through Arkansas for the transmission line would run near the eight cities where the meetings were held. The route will be part of about 750 miles of transmission lines extending from wind farms in western Oklahoma through Arkansas and into western Tennessee.

Personnel from the Public Service Commission attended the meetings to learn more about the route Clean Line plans and the status of the project, said John Bethel, executive director of the commission’s general staff.

Without being authorized as a public utility in Arkansas, Clean Line could build the transmission line as a merchant operator, but would not have the right to take portions of land through eminent domain, Bethel said.

The $2 billion project is in the early stages of development and would take five to seven years to complete.

“We are having discussions with some utilities in Arkansas about having them as a customer, so they could supply energy to their customers from our lines,” Hurtado said. “Those talks are coming along.”

Clean Line also is seeking to get an environmental impact statement for the project from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Southwestern Power Administration, Hurtado said.

Many landowners and local officials, some concerned about conservation and use of the land, attended the recent meetings, Hurtado said.

“All of these open houses were very much a process of dialogue,” Hurtado said. “It was not only us telling people about our project but people telling us things they wanted us to know.”

Because the route is so long, Clean Line plans to run electricity over direct current lines instead of alternating current, Hurtado said.

“When you are trying to move a lot of power a long distance, [direct current] is the most efficient way to do that,” Hurtado said. “We will deliver about 3,500 megawatts. Over the course of a year, that is enough energy to power about 1 million homes, about three times what the Hoover Dam produces.”

Business, Pages 25 on 12/06/2012

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