As the battle over how best to solve California’s electricitywoes bounces around the regulatory and political halls inCalifornia and Washington, DC, an immovable stumbling block thatcan’t be fixed by new legislation or regulatory decisions is anoverworked electricity highway called “Path 15.”

In essence Path 15 has become a roadblock in the California gridthat will not be fixed within the next critical two-year period,although new generation in the northern half of the state couldhelp work around this increasingly significant barrier.

As sources of power to satisfy the state’s insatiable appetitefor electricity have dried up and are expected to become scarcer,the physical limitations of moving electrons in the nation’s mostpopulous state have grown in importance. Unfortunately, as is thecase with the state’s shortfall of generation plants, majortransmission upgrades take a minimum of five years.

California’s problem on Path 15 has been recognized but dealtwith in economically expedient short-term ways for more than adecade, according to Kellan Fluckiger, COO of the CaliforniaIndependent System Operator (Cal-ISO), the state-chartered,nonprofit grid operator. Over the years, the periods of time inwhich the Path 15 constraints cause problems has grownexponentially.

Path 15 is a series of two 500-KV electricity transmission linesand underlying 230-KV lines. They operate in “parallel,” whichmeans if one trips the others automatically picks up the slack bytransferring the electricity to the operable lines. Each line is”studied” in an engineering sense and rated according to theircurrent capability, said Fluckiger, an engineer with extensiveelectrical utility experience.

“What is needed is the addition of some large, 500-KV lines thatspan the same distance from southern to northern California,” hesaid recently in one of the daily Cal-ISO power crisis briefings.”We have large, robust grids in the south and north, and then thisbottleneck shipping power between them. It (the path) simply needsto be upgraded with a third 500-KV interconnection. That is reallywhat needs to happen.

“The reason it takes five to seven years is the rights-of-wayacquisition discussion and the local opposition (along the way) tosomething communities generally feel is unsightly.”

Fluckiger said the proposed upgrade has been planned for 10years, but it wasn’t built in the early 1990s because it was”cheaper to dispatch generation uneconomically than pay the cost ofa project like this (several hundred million dollars), and you canbuy what is considered ‘out-of-merit-order generation’ for thatprice.”

Now the number of hours of so-called “uneconomic dispatch” aregetting so large, it is economic to build the transmission line.But is it too late?

Path 15 is located in Pacific Gas and Electric Co. territory, sothat investor-owned utility would construct and own the facility,turning operation of it over to Cal-ISO. But how does the PG&Eutility, allegedly struggling to stay out of bankruptcy court,undertake this massive project?

For the immediate winter season, Fluckiger expects Path 15 toremain a major stumbling block. The critical times are at night inthe winter season when Pacific Northwest power operators back offhydroelectric sources to store water for use in the daytime. Theydepend on power from California and several surrounding states.That power comes from the north end of California and must bereplenished from the south, hence the importance of Path 15.

It is another piece of the puzzle that keeps Fluckiger and hisCal-ISO engineers scratching their heads and working long hoursyear-round these days.

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