Their Own Private Power Line

“If you try to connect to the grid in Minnesota today in the Buffalo Ridge, MISO [the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator, the organization that controls the region’s power grid] is not even going to study your interconnection—do a system-impact study—until 2017. That’s what they quoted last fall,” says Ingrid Bjorklund, vice president of government affairs for Chaska-based Outland Renewable Energy, a developer of wind-power projects and supplier of maintenance services for wind farms. “I’m sure it’s even longer now.”

New transmission lines proposed by utilities including Xcel Energy and up for review by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission would add transmission capacity in the Buffalo Ridge area by 2013 or 2014. But that won’t help Outland, Bjorklund says. Because wind developments are queued up with MISO to gain access to transmission, those proposed public lines would benefit the wind projects that have already been in the queue for some time. Outland has a new project that would go to the back of the line: plans for a 200-mega-watt wind farm that it wants to build in northwestern Iowa.

The long MISO queue and backlogged megawatts of power generation waiting to be built are one measure of how constrained the transmission system is. Another is this: The bottleneck is breeding innovation and risk taking.

Along with its Iowa wind project, Outland plans to build a privately financed 3,000-megawatt transmission line from Tracy, Minnesota, to Shakopee, at an estimated cost of $225 million.

“Our line will ensure that we’re able to move our wind,” Bjorklund says. “When a utility builds a transmission line, they are subject to open access under FERC [the [Federal Energy Regulatory Commission], and then everybody gets in the queue. Our line insures that our wind projects will move out of the area.”

There are a few precedents elsewhere in the country, Bjorklund says, “We have a FERC attorney in D.C., and the first one we became aware of was a line called Sagebrush. That’s in California, and they did a private transmission line and were exempt from open access by FERC. Because of their status [as a power generator that sells wholesale to utilities], then the transmission is viewed as part of the generation.” There are other qualifying criteria, she adds. Bjorklund says an arm of Florida Power and Light, a major wind-energy developer, also built a private line in Colorado.