Utilities and transmission managers try to head off congressional grid plans

Major utilities and grid operators are planning an expansion of the Eastern interconnection grid to handle a huge increase in renewable power, seeking to head off congressional proposals for federal grid planning. David Whiteley, a former senior executive with the North American Electric Reliability Corp. and Ameren Corp., has been brought in to head the initiative. The energy companies and organizations -- which have never before met for such a purpose -- want to show Congress that a grassroots planning approach will be more effective than creating a new, top-down planning process under close federal control, Whiteley said in an interview. "There are two philosophies. One is where one entity does it for everybody," he said. "The group agreed [instead] that interconnection-wide analysis was best handled by the regional plans already being developed, rolling them into one, and building an interconnection-wide analysis over that." The participants in the Atlanta meeting came together after two transmission expansion plans were offered in the Senate, one by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the other by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Both would create new transmission planning processes for the Eastern and Western interconnection grids, which are divided by the Rocky Mountains...NYTimes