Project will let electricity flow

Hundreds of miles of transmission line proposed Tuesday will ease the flow of cheap power in and out of the city's main source of energy.

Lubbock customers will pay an unknown share of the $1.4 billion in projects directors of the Southwest Power Pool proposed stretching through Oklahoma and Kansas.

The high-voltage power lines should help release lower-cost power stuck in those areas and crack a window on the thousands of stranded wind energy megawatts experts said wait to reach customers outside the state.

"We've still got a long way to go to where we can move this huge resource to the rest of the country," said Richard Walker, a wind energy consultant and instructor at Texas Tech's Wind Science and Engineering Center.

Most of Texas taps a power grid isolated from the rest of the country managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

Lubbock and the rest of the Texas Panhandle sits beyond the state's electric island and inside the Southwest Power Pool.

The arrangement gives Lubbock and its wholesale power provider, Xcel Energy, access to cheaper energy generated outside the state. But transmission problems have kept the lower-cost juice bottled up in Kansas and Oklahoma.

"It's really about improving regional access to all of our types of generation and prices of generation, and getting that energy across the constraints," pool spokeswoman Emily Pennell said.

The same issues have helped keep Texas wind energy bottled in.

Texas utility regulators approved construction of massive transmission lines to connect Austin, Dallas and other big-city markets to the wind turbines springing up over farmland across the plains.

Those are big customers, Walker said. But the real target are the huge markets along each coast, he said.

That will have to happen through the power pool, and Tuesday's projects should help, he said.

"We're, let's say, 10 percent of the way along," Walker said.

Texas has more than 40,000 megawatts of wind energy potential - enough at peak production for roughly 10 million homes - waiting for access to a power grid, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Wind potential doesn't matter without power lines connecting farms to big markets, said Michael Goggin, manager of transmission policy for the association. The pool's proposal to share among the states the costs of the transmission work - still awaiting approval from federal regulators - was critical to installing the badly needed transmission, he said.

"The project is being built in an area where there's a huge amount of wind and not a lot of transmission," Goggin said. "There's a lot of wind power waiting in the Panhandle that's in SPP's area that simply can't get out."

It will take years to finish the project, though it should take less than a decade, Pennell said.

Federal regulators must still approve how the pool members proposed to split the costs. State regulators must still approve where exactly the new lines would run.

Xcel could not yet estimate how the projects could affect local rates, up or down, spokesman Wes Reeves said in an e-mailed response to questions.

But the company supported the projects and believed they would benefit the Texas Panhandle, he wrote.

"Just as modern highways led to economic development of our region after World War II, new transmission lines will better connect us with new energy marketplaces and drive demand for homegrown energy," Reeves wrote.