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PATH moves to stay on the map
PATH, the 765,000-volt transmission line planned for northern Loudoun County, certainly is going somewhere, according to the company’s response to a motion to kill the project.
PATH is going where it always has been going, according to a PATH Allegheny filing Oct. 26 with the Virginia State Corporation Commission – the proposed Kemptown Substation just south of New Market, Md.
PATH Allegheny, the partnership between Allegheny Energy and American Electric Power to build a line from St. Albans, W.Va., to Maryland, will not be derailed by a recent setback in Maryland, according to the papers filed in Virginia.
In September, the Maryland Public Service Commission rejected the portion of PATH under its jurisdiction on the grounds that the applicant is not technically an electric company, as defined by Maryland law. The decision gave PATH 30 days to fix the problem and to refile or announce a date when it would be refilling.
On Oct. 9, PATH’s attorney, J. Joseph Curran -- who has served six years on the Maryland Public Service Commission -- told the Maryland commissioners only that “the company continues to consider its filing options, including whether to refile” and will let the commissioners know “as soon as possible.”
The Virginia State Corporation Commission staff on Oct. 19 asked the three commissioners to dismiss the PATH application because the staff could not be expected to evaluate a project for which the exact route is not known. Without approval from Maryland, the staff argued, PATH ends at the banks of the Potomac River in Loudoun County.
“Erroneous and baseless” is PATH Allegheny’s description of that argument. PATH is going to Kemptown, as planned.
The fact that another application has not yet 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.]."
In fact, PATH Allegheny may bypass Maryland entirely and file an application for the Maryland portion of the project directly with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The Energy Act of 2005 gave the federal agency power to override a state’s denial of a project it deems to be in the national interest.
Allegheny Energy, in partnership with American Electric Power, has filed in West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland to build a 765,000-volt transmission line from the coal-fired generating plant in St. Albans, W.Va., to the proposed new Kemptown substation in Maryland. A little more than 10 miles of the line, if built, will pass through northern Loudoun County, from Between the Hills to the Potomac River just west of Point of Rocks.
Allegheny Energy asserts that existing lines will be overloaded, resulting in voltage drops and outages, by June 2014 if the PATH project is not built. Even though the power is being routed to the East Coast, those outages will affect Virginia, according to the company, and PATH must be in place to avert those problems. The need for PATH existed when the application was first filed with the commission in Virginia, the response asserts, and it still exists today.
Opponents of the line, including many in northern Loudoun County, charge that the power companies’ real motive is to move cheap, coal-fired electricity from West Virginia to the more lucrative East Coast markets in New York and New Jersey.
The Virginia commission held public hearings on the project in Purcellville and in Winchester, in September. It has scheduled a Nov. 19 public hearing in Lovettsville. The commission is expected to rule on its staff’s motion to dismiss the application before that time.
Contact the reporter at jershan@comcast.net
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