Interesting dilemma: Dominion predicts that Northern Virginia faces the risk of blackouts by 2011 unless a 240-mile high-voltage transmission line is built from Pennsylvania to a power sub-station in Loudoun County. Predictably, the Piedmont Environmental Council and other citizen groups are up in arms — nobody likes transmission lines cutting through their farms and villages. (Read about the latest wrinkle in this long-running saga in this report by the Winchester Star and this by the Washington Post.)
I live near a transmission line and I can tell you, it is U-G-L-Y, though I don’t have much grounds for complaint — I moved into my house knowing that it was there.
Next to the Dulles South controversy, which seems to be resolved now, the transmission line is the hottest controversy in the northern Virginia piedmont. I don’t sense that residents of Fairfax County and other urbanized counties in the region have reached the same fever pitch of agitation as the citizens of Loudoun who will be most immediately affected. The suburban citizenry will live in sublime disregard of the inevitable until the inevitable hits them in the form of brownouts and blackouts. Then all hell will break loose.
If the debate is cast in an either/or format, the Piedmont Environmental Council and its constituents will lose. Virginia’s political system will favor the interests of the nearly two million residents of Virginia’s Washington suburbs who are threatened with electricity blackouts over the interests of a few tens of thousands of rural residents who are threatened with a loss of pristine vistas.
But the debate does not have to be either/or. There are alternatives. As I touched upon in a previous post, “Fixing the Power Grid: Distributed Generation,” and will explore in detail in an upcoming column, the problem is the current electric industry paradigm centered on huge power plants, typically located in remote areas, that connect to population centers with high-voltage power lines. As long as we stick with that model, monster power lines are an unavoidable necessity, and the rights of landowners along their routes will be sacrificed for the “common good.”
The alternative is moving to a system of smaller-scale power sources embedded in close proximity to the consumers of the electricity. Photovoltaic electricity is on the cusp of being economically competitive. According to Saifur Rahman, a Virginia Tech expert in distributed generation, it would cost only $10,000 to install an array of photovoltaic cells on a roof-top, with batteries for storage, capable of generating enough power for a family of three. Such a system could sell electric power into the grid on bright sunny days and draw from the grid during other times. If the installation cost were rolled into a mortgage, it could be paid off over years with the savings from electric bills. The main constraint right now, Rahman says, is not the efficiency of the solar arrays but the difficulty finding contractors qualified to install them.
If the financial savings aren’t enough to induce you to install solar units, consider this: Having your own energy source protects you against local power outages from snow storms, ice storms, hurricanes and other natural disasters. (Hurricane Isabel knocked me off the grid for 10 days.)
Another commercially competitive technology is cogeneration — smaller power plants that generate electricity and convert waste heat to steam, which can be used for heating/air conditioning. Cogeneration would be most applicable to apartment buildings, office clusters and other densely populated areas.
More decentralized and small-scale energy sources would present technical challenges for a distribution system designed for giant power plants. Kinks would have to be worked out. But such a system would be more stable and less vulnerable to system-wide blackouts like the one that afflicted 50 million people a couple of years ago. Oh, and for what it’s worth, Dominion wouldn’t have to run transmission lines through so many peoples’ farms and back yards.