Lack of power lines stalls Midwest wind energy

While hundreds of wind turbines dot the landscape of western Kansas, the region has few high-voltage power lines to transmit the energy they generate. "You can put up all the towers and turbines you like, but without more transmission lines, the added electricity won’t get to the cities that could use it," Steve Everly of the Kansas City Star reports. The lines cost tens of billions of dollars and will take years to put up, if at all.

“It’s a showstopper for renewable development,” Ralph Cavanaugh, co-director of the 1.3-million-member Natural Resources Defense Council, told Everly. Kansas, which ranks third among states in wind energy potential, hopes to expand its current 1,000 megawatts of production to 7,000 megawatts by 2020. But only a late lobbying effort from Gov. Mark Parkinson kept a vital transmission line set to traverse southern Kansas on the Southwest Power Pool's agenda.

Transmission line controversies are popping up across the country, including one surrounding the $1.9 billion Potomac-Appalachian Transmission Highline through West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia. But unlike PATH, which would transmit mostly coal-produced electricity, line development in Kansas and the Midwest has a new ally, Everly reports: "The need to improve the grid is pressing enough that it even has some new champions — environmentalists who once opposed high-voltage lines because they might carry electricity from coal-fired plants." (Read more)