Power line project charges debate
EIGHTY FOUR, Pa. (AP) – The farmhouse Deb Bandel built with her husband in this southwest corner of Pennsylvania was meant to be a peaceful retreat from the bustle of the outside world. But a fixture of modern life may soon carve a path through their lush 134-acre property: a buzzing, crackling high-voltage power line.
“We built what we thought was the house we’d live in for the rest of our lives,” said Bandel, whose farmland 25 miles southwest of Pittsburgh was once owned by her in-laws. “I don’t want to live this close to a line.”
The 500-kilovolt line, which would be strung from towers an average of 125 to 140 feet tall, has become a point of bitter contention for Bandel and other residents in this region. They have formed an activist group, Stop the Towers.
Local residents are worried it will hurt property values, the environment and possibly their health, and question whether it will benefit the area.
The line is part of a larger project to build a 240-mile transmission line that would pass through West Virginia and continue to northern Virginia, easing congestion in the mid-Atlantic electrical grid and channeling power to the eastern seaboard, where power plants are relatively few and electricity is more expensive.
The Pennsylvania section of the line, however, would serve only mushrooming local demand, according to Allegheny Energy Inc., one of two utilities that would build the line.
Electricity customers between New Jersey and Washington would cover the costs of the project, which is expected to help lower the price of electricity in those areas and is targeted to be completed in 2011.
Still more lines are being considered by Valley Forge-based PJM Interconnection, the company that operates the grid in a 13-state area, as the vast power network undergoes its first major expansion in decades.
Two other proposed lines – from West Virginia to Maryland and from Pennsylvania to New Jersey – are under review by PJM this year. They are among about 10 major power line projects currently on the table, all of them subject to regulatory approval.
Like the larger section of the Allegheny Energy line, some of the other proposals revolve around bringing surplus electricity from large, coal-fired power plants in Appalachia and the Midwest to the densely populated East Coast.
“When you build this stuff, you don’t build it for today, you build it for tomorrow,” said Ray Dotter, a PJM spokesman.
The company continuously updates a 15-year plan to avoid overloaded lines that could lead to costly blackouts such as the one that swept from Ohio to Canada and New York City in 2003, he said.
In southwestern Pennsylvania, members of Stop the Towers express concerns about the possible health effects of electromagnetic fields given off by high-voltage power lines, though studies have been inconclusive.
The building of the line would also scar the landscape, say members of the group, which has a distribution list of about 500 people and has held meetings at churches and fairgrounds and bought newspaper ads and radio spots.
They also fear property values will decrease – also the subject of inconclusive studies – or that they will be forced to move because their houses fall in the path of the line, which requires a 200-foot-wide swath.
Harry and Mike Cross, a father-and-son team of bricklayers, lives in homes a short distance from Bandel’s farm and are among those worried they might have to vacate. The line, they say, would sweep across nearby land and one relative’s trailer.
Allegheny Energy owns rights to install the line on land along most of the proposed route, in some cases purchased decades ago, said David Neurohr, a spokesman for the company. It owns easements on land owned by Bandel and the Crosses.
The company has said southwestern Pennsylvania’s electrical system has become strained because of commercial and residential growth, and new lines are needed to avoid future blackouts or brownouts. The activists, Neurohr said, are a vocal minority.
But Bill Pollock, an energy consultant and Stop the Towers member, said “we have much more power than we need now or could need in the future” because of plants built years ago to support the area’s once-thriving industrial base.
“We also have a very robust infrastructure for transmission lines,” he said. “They’ll make hundreds of millions of dollars of additional profits. That’s the only reason they’re going after it.”
But experts say power distribution is no longer localized, as it once was, nor is generation centralized.
“Does the power line in Virginia help the people in New York? Yes, it does, but it’s also helping people in Virginia,” said Phillip F. Schewe, chief science writer at Maryland-based American Institute of Physics and author of “The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World.” “It’s a sort of situation where all of these lines help everybody.”
“You can’t say that it’s carrying power from A to B … because the electricity made in a generator goes to 100 cities,” he said.
The Department of Energy, meanwhile, has proposed two electricity “transmission corridors” on the East and West coasts – designations that could spur the building of major new power lines in many states regardless of local opposition.
That proposal has met with opposition from lawmakers and others, and public hearings are planned.
Like other members of Stop the Towers, Deb Bandel knew of the possibility that new power lines could be built on her land.
“We may move, if I can talk my husband into it,” she said. “We had no idea the magnitude of this.”
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On the Net:
PJM Interconnection: http://www.pjm.com/index.jsp
Allegheny Energy: http://www.alleghenypower.com/
Stop the Towers: http://stopthetowers.org/