Vital Power Transmission Grid Needs Upgrade
West Virginia State Journal
March 14, 2006
Like most West Virginians unable to attend the Fiesta Bowl in January, I watched the great Mountaineer victory from the comfort of my home, in Falls Church, Va. My television consumed electricity in order to bring the game into my family room, but I have no idea whether the power I used that night came from generating plants in eastern Colorado, Maine, West Virginia or parts in between.
Similarly, the electricity that kept the lights on at the University of Phoenix Stadium, where the game was being played may have come from power plants located in California, Washington state or even Mexico or Canada.
One of our great national treasures — a treasure we rarely think about because it works so well — is the network of electric transmission lines that crisscross the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia. This interconnected network allows electricity to instantaneously move from power plants where it is produced to places where it is needed and consumed, sometimes across several states.
Transmission of electricity is as vital to reliable service as the power plants that generate electricity and the poles and wires in your neighborhood that bring it to your home. The transmission system also permits the states where the electricity is produced to benefit from jobs and increased tax revenues.
We’re all using electricity more than ever, not only to light our homes and run our televisions, refrigerators and air-conditioners, but also to power our computers and cell phones and keep us connected to that latest modern marvel, the Internet.
The electric transmission system, which benefits us all daily, needs to be expanded to keep pace with our growing appetite for electricity.
The organizations responsible for the reliable operation of the interstate electricity transmission system have concluded that upgrades in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia (and many other states) are needed to ensure reliable supplies of power in coming years.
We who live and work east of the Appalachians need more generation in our region, and we all need to use electricity more effi ciently. But even if all the planned generation is built and we do a better job of effi ciently using the power, we still will need to expand the region’s transmission system to maintain reliable electric service.
Improvements to the interstate transmission system can provide economic benefits to West Virginia in much the same way that construction of interstate highways vastly improved transportation into and out of the state when they were built some 30 years ago.
When I was a freshman at West Virginia University in 1970, the trip from St. Albans sometimes took almost seven hours and involved a route through Parkersburg to New Martinsville to Morgantown. In those days, there was no Hino Motors truck assembly plant in Wood County or an FBI Center in Clarksburg.
These facilities and the jobs they brought stemmed in part from construction of the interstates that more directly linked West Virginia to towns and cities in the rest of the region and thus connected our state to other regional markets. While the future is hard to predict, it is likely that expansion of the regional electric transmission system will deliver similar benefits.
And just as I-68 allows thousands of WVU fans living in the D.C./Baltimore area to return home and see the Mountaineers in Morgantown, the needed transmission improvements will ensure that we can continue to watch the games on TV when we can’t make it to Mountaineer Field.
Dan Larcamp was born in South Charleston, was raised in St. Albans and graduated from West Virginia University, where he played on the Mountaineer football team. He is a spokesperson for the Edison Electric Institute.
