Guest speakers at Thursday's Rotary Club meeting were Charles Friddle, Account Manager for Allegheny Power, and Allen Staggers, Allegheny Power Manager of Communications.

Friddle and Staggers presented the group with a PowerPoint presentation on the proposed Interstate transmission line, known as the Trans-Allegheny Interstate Line (TrAIL). The new transmission line will be 240 miles and will be 500 kilovolts. The line should run from southwestern Pennsylvania to West Virginia, then to Northern Virginia. The proposed cost for the project is estimated to be $1.4 billion.

According to Friddle, the new transmission line is needed so that the supply of electricity meets the demand for electricity.

“Without this project, it's determined that by 2011 there will be 12 electrical problems with possible blackouts and brownouts,” Friddle said.

Such issues were brought to attention by the August 14, 2003, blackout in Ohio.

According to Friddle, this blackout cost the economy $1 billion. Blackouts are usually caused by an overload in electricity demand; the transformer can not handle the demand and therefor malfunctions. A new transmission line would be used in conjunction with the existing lines as an alternate electrical path and would help prevent blackouts.

Other benefits include improving system reliability; increasing west-to-east transfer capability; making cost-effective generation available to more consumers; and economic benefits for West Virginia and Southwestern Pennsylvania. Additional benefits are expanding markets for local coal, more jobs, and the potential for new generation projects such as clean-coal technologies and renewable energies, such as wind and hydro.

The project should take about one year for siting to be complete, a year or less for approval, two years for engineering and rightaway, and two years for construction. The site section of the TrAIL consists of gathering data on land use and environmental constraints, which allows for the investigation of alternative line routes. According to Friddle, an underground transmission line is not a very feasible option. An underground line would require the use of DC current, whereas above ground lines use an AC current. If a line ran underground then resurfaced to an above ground line, a transformer would be needed to convert the line from DC to AC. According to Friddle, no underground transmission line of this magnitude has been completed in the U.S. and costs would be astronomical.

In June, the Pennsylvania-Jersey-Maryland (portion of the United States electrical power grid) board approved the project, and in July the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved of incentive rate treatment. The commission granted the following three incentives:

€ a return on equity on the high end of a range or reasonableness, with the specific return to be determined in a later proceeding;

€ recovery of construction work in progress (CWIP) prior to the in-service date of the project;

€ the ability to expense and recover pre-construction costs if the project is abandoned as a result of factors beyond its control.

In the months of November and December, Allegheny Power held Open Houses for those residents who would be affected by the new transmission line. The project has a targeted completion date of 2011.