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West Virginia joins in call to dismiss PATH plans
The path to PATH developed several significant roadblocks in the last week. West Virginia joined Virginia in a move to dismiss the application for the power line until its fate in Maryland is clear. And the No To PATH citizens organization rejected an offer to hold a meeting in Lovettsville Nov. 16.
PATH -- Potomac-Appalachian Transmission Highline -- is a joint project of Allegheny Energy and American Electric Power to move electricity on 765,000-volt above-ground transmission lines from the coal-fired plant in Amos, W.Va., to an as-yet-unbuilt substation near New Market, Md., 275 miles and three states away. Once there, the electricity can feed into transmission lines that serve the East Coast. PATH has filed applications with regulators in West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland for permission to get the project started by mid-2010 and in operation by June 2014.
The trouble started in early September when Maryland regulators threw out the application there on grounds that the applicant is not a electric company as defined by Maryland law. The Maryland regulators gave Potomac Edison, PATH’s Maryland partner, 30 days to file an acceptable application or to give the commission a time line for refiling.
As of Nov. 3, PATH has not done so. PATH spokesman Mark Nitowski said only, “We continue to weigh our options and remain committed to the PATH project, including the Maryland facilities.”
That lack of response, said the Virginia State Corporation Commission staff on Oct. 19, leaves them evaluating a project that ends at the banks of the Potomac River in Loudoun County. The staff asked commissioners to dismiss the application.
Not so, replied PATH on Oct. 26. The fact that another application has not been filed in Maryland, the response continues, “does not change the fact that the terminus of the PATH Project remains at the Kemptown Substation [near New Market, Md.].”
Then on Oct. 28, in what opponent John Flannery called “the Maryland domino effect,” staff members at the West Virginia Public Service Commission asked their commissioners to dismiss the application because the lack of an application in Maryland leaves it fatally flawed: “This Commission should not be required to review an incomplete project.”
They asked the application be dismissed, or that PATH file for a “tolling” – a delay that stops the regulatory clock until the new data on power supply and demand are released in January.
PATH has hinted it might seek to bypass the states. The federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 allows a project in an area deemed a National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor” – nearly the entire northeast is so designated -- to apply directly to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission if a state does not act on an application within one year. In March, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that applies only to a missed deadline, but does not mean the applicant can go to the federal agency if the state denies its application.
The Edison Electric Institute, the association of American shareholder-owned electric companies, has asked the Supreme Court to review that ruling. No decision from the Supreme Court, on whether it will hear the case, is expected until next summer.
No To PATH members voted unanimously last week to turn down a proposed meeting. They had sought the meeting but objected to the way PATH structured it. The meeting, said No To PATH spokesman Malcolm Baldwin, of Lovettsville, would rule out “all discussion about what really concerns this community – that we don’t need it, and that its $1.85 billion cost to ratepayers would vastly exceed its benefits, that the line offers no real reliability improvement, and would cause devastating impacts along the entire line, not only in our own community.”
Contact the reporter at jershan@comcast.net
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