[Yesterday’s post discussed how FERC failed to implement the siting authority granted in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and examined a case study about why it failed. Part II looks at Obama’s “green power” superhighway, the recent work by regional transmission planning organizations to bring renewable energy to market, and the extremely high costs to do so.]

Public policy has long supported the ability to construct new transmission lines that relieve congestion and reduce the cost of energy to consumers. However, it is another question entirely to construct a new “green” coast-to-coast transmission corridor given the mess our transmission system is in today and its prohibitive cost. Critics have complaint that it is throwing good (transmission) money at bad (renewable) generation money.

Slowly, regional system operators are resolving transmission bottlenecks and improving the smooth flow of energy in their service territories.…

[Yesterday’s post discussed how FERC failed to implement the siting authority granted in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and examined a case study about why it failed. Part II looks at Obama’s “green power” superhighway, the recent work by regional transmission planning organizations to bring renewable energy to market, and the extremely high costs to do so.]

Public policy has long supported the ability to construct new transmission lines that relieve congestion and reduce the cost of energy to consumers. However, it is another question entirely to construct a new “green” coast-to-coast transmission corridor given the mess our transmission system is in today and its prohibitive cost. Critics have complaint that it is throwing good (transmission) money at bad (renewable) generation money.

Slowly, regional system operators are resolving transmission bottlenecks and improving the smooth flow of energy in their service territories.…

[Editor note: The post is a slightly revised version of what was posted at the Institute for Energy Research website on September 17. The primary author was Daniel R. Simmons, director of state energy affairs. Next week, Michael Giberson will evaluate IER’s defense of the Danish study at MasterResource in light of his own first impressions.]

Energy is critical for our economy and our future, and the real issues deserve to be debated. That is why we appreciated the initial response on the American Wind Energy Association’s website to the recent study, Wind Energy: The Case of Denmark. It appears that AWEA actually read the study and raised some questions related to energy.

The same cannot be said of other responses, such as this blog post from NRDC.…

We are used to hearing about how far behind the curve the United States is on energy. Just today, we were reminded that Germany and China will gobble up our future since we have failed to invest in solar and wind technologies, in particular, photovoltaic fabrication plants.

Actually, that’s not quite true. There are quite a number of PV plants in the U.S., just not any using the technology touted by the New York Times reporter.

And as for wind: did you know that “China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy.” That is not true either. Current wind generating capacity in the U.S. is just shy of 30,000 MW, larger than any other country, including Germany (24,000 MW) and China (13,000 MW).…