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Vice president of strategic development for administrator says stronger network is a necessity
New York's transmission network needs reinforcement now, said Garry Brown, vice president of strategic development for the group that administers the state's power grid.
Brown, of the Guilderland-based New York Independent System Operator, spoke Thursday morning at the annual meeting of The Business Council of New York State Inc., held at The Sagamore resort in Bolton Landing.
"We've got to get the system more reliable," he said, urging changes for reasons of both safety and economics. "We need to strengthen our transmission grid."
Brown made his comments in the wake of the Aug. 14 blackout, which affected 50 million people in the Midwest, Northeast and Canada. So far, he said, NYISO investigators and others haven't found anything in New York that led to the outage.
In fact, while the origin of the blackout is suspected to lie in the Midwest, nobody has been able to pinpoint what triggered the cascading outage. And that has led some to wonder how change can be on the table yet.
"It just doesn't make sense to me before we really know what caused the blackout," Gerald Norlander, executive director of the Public Utility Law Project in Albany, said in a telephone interview Thursday afternoon. His group helps low-income and rural consumers with electricity matters.
More transmission might improve energy prices for some New Yorkers, whom NYISO says have paid $2.75 billion over the past three years because of the state's too-crowded power grid. Because of the way the grid is designed, electricity often has trouble flowing from areas where it is plentiful, such as western New York, to places where it is needed, in the New York City area.
But for those enjoying cheap electricity now, it could get more expensive once bottlenecks are eased. So paying for those improvements has been a problem. NYSIO's Brown said that while deregulation has done well to encourage new generation, it has provided less incentive to build new transmission lines.
The state Senate passed a bill earlier this week that would make it easier to upgrade lines or site new ones, though the Assembly appears less likely to act on it.
The Business Council has proposed using a "significant portion" of the system benefits charge, a $150 million annual fee charged to utility customers, to beef up transmission.
That suggestion doesn't sit well with Norlander, who said the state Power Authority could erect new transmission lines if they were needed so badly. Plus, the programs the benefits charge supports -- including alternative-energy development and assistance to low-income customers -- are needed badly, he said.
"What are they going to cut?" he asked.
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