"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you,
then they fight you, then you win." -- Mohandas Gandhi
This post is for land owners who want to sign a right of way agreement with AEP/Allegheny for the PATH power line.
As I have stated in past posts, you could probably do better by forcing the power companies into your county circuit court in a condemnation case if they ever get eminent domain powers in February 2011.
If there is some reason you would rather take your chances and agree voluntarily to give up your land, I’d like to offer some suggestions.
- Don’t accept any of the power company documents offered by PATH land agents, including survey agreements and right of way options.
- Hire your own lawyer to prepare your own documents. Include the cost of the attorney’s fees in your damages from AEP/Allegheny.
- Include in your documents the requirement that the right of way can only be cleared by “cutting and trimming” and that no herbicides of any kind may be used to control vegetation, by aerial spraying, by manual application on the ground or by basal stump application.
- Include in your documents that at no time may readings on a properly calibrated Gauss meter exceed 4 milligauss on any part of the right of way or any area outside the right of way. 4 milligauss is the widely accepted for public exposure to electromagnetic fields. (Here is a link to Alfred Ghirozi’s testimony before the VA SCC which gives a good summary on EMF research.) Why should the power companies expose you and your family, or your livestock, to anything more?
- In your documents you should state that AEP/Allegheny must provide you with a properly calibrated Gauss meter, at their expense, so that you can independently monitor the electromagnetic fields emanating from their lines.
As a land owner, you have a responsibility to your family, your land and your community to negotiate the best possible deal if you want to settle with AEP/Allegheny over the PATH right of way. Insist on what is best for you, not for these out of state corporations.
After all, if they don’t agree with your terms, they can always take you to court in your home county. You can then make your case to a jury of your neighbors and fellow land owners.
On Thursday afternoon, I attended a presentation by executives of Appalachian Power at the WV Legislature in Charleston. COO Dana Waldo led the Power Point show along with Bill Wright, the VP in charge of Appalachain’s distribution system in southern WV.
The emphasis, of course, was on trees that were not on Appalachain’s rights of way that fell on the power company’s lines. Wright noted that the December blackout included damage to 46 transmission lines, 47 substations and 111 distribution lines.
Mr. Wright did not tell us how much of this damage was caused by trees and how much was caused by other failure. That would have been nice to know, because then we would have had a sense of how much damage may have been caused by trees and how much might have been avoided if AEP and Appalachian Power had properly invested in repair and replacement of fatigued and damaged equipment.
Instead, Mr. Wright and Mr. Waldo focused on the damage in Mingo and Logan Counties that was caused by trees in “remote” areas. They made it sound like Mingo County was in the upper reaches of the Amazon.
Of course, the Appalachain Power execs were focusing on Logan and Mingo Counties, because most of the Delegates at the meeting were from those counties. They were focusing on the trees so no one would ask the really hard questions about neglect and lack of past investment in all of their WV service area. They did not identify how much of the blackout damage could have been avoided by good management so that more resources could have been devoted to fixing damage that was truly unavoidable.
One thing was evident in the slide show. Appalachian Power had to relocate lines and perform major construction during an emergency that, with some better planning, could have been done as a part of a routine maintenance and upgrade process. You can bet that they will be satisfied for decades into the future with poles and construction work that was done in a rush and in completely saturated soil.
Del. Clifford Moore from McDowell County asked Mr. Waldo if his constituents could expect relief from Appalachian Power’s ever rising electric rates. Mr. Waldo did a wonderful rhetorical dance for all of us with lots of talk about payment plans, etc. When he was finished, Del. Moore said “I guess that means ‘no’ then.”
When he tried to explain Appalachain’s most recent rate increase, Waldo actually had the nerve to claim that the increase was caused by emission controls that had been required by the EPA. Only later did he state the real reason — rising coal prices for Appalachain’s coal-fired plants. Mr. Waldo did not mention that Appalachain’s fuel buyers also screwed up by locking themselves into longer term contracts at high prices because they did not foresee the more recent price drops.
Needless to say, Mr. Waldo did not tell Del. Moore that he can expect even higher electric rates from AEP/Allegheny’s obsolete power line projects like TrAIL and PATH. Mr. Waldo did not tell Del. Moore that his constituents, through FERC’s rate schemes for these transmission lines, will be paying the power companies 12% to 15% profits on these and other PJM Interconnection power line projects.
My power is out again. Southern Calhoun County has 4″ of snow.
Paul Evanson, CEO of Allegheny Energy, and number 8 on Forbes list of best compensated US executives, held his quarterly phone conference with investors yesterday. Here is a link to the transcript.
Forbes notes that Mr. Evanson received more than $10 million in salary and stock awards in 2009. He didn’t mention that in his conference call. Instead, he bragged about how Allegheny would not be paying any federal taxes in 2010 and how the company had not increased spending on maintenance and operations for the last five years.
Here is the well paid Mr. Evanson in his own words:
And we’ll be vigilant in our efforts to control costs and spending. Our plan is to keep [inaudible] O&M [Operations & Maintenance] flat marking the fifth consecutive year of no increase in costs, an accomplishment I think few can match.
I liked the “few can match” comment. Of course, the 52,000 Allegheny customers in WV who are without power right now would probably not agree that this is much of an “accomplishment.” The well compensated Mr. Evanson should be a little more “vigilant” about the reliability of his company’s service to its West Virginia customers.
Mr. Evanson also brags about how Allegheny is going to leave us chumps to pay all their taxes for them next year:
This election is the result of the change in federal tax rules that allow us to deduct repair costs previously capitalized. It will create a cash flow benefit of about $120 million this year and as a result we won’t be a cash taxpayer in 2010 [!!!!]. We reached agreements with the parties in our case on a procedural schedule that sets evidentiary hearings in early April. [emphasis and !!!! mine]
It’s a good thing that we rate payers will be paying for TrAIL and PATH, plus the guaranteed profits. It looks like Allegheny and Mr. Evanson are having a tough time not maintaining our distribution system or paying their taxes.
Stop PATH WV has a new Web site that is less bloggy and more Web sitey. Check it out here. I think you will find it most informative. I have also added a permanent link to the site under Citizen Sites Against PATH in the right hand column.
AEP CEO Mike Morris was asked about delays in PATH during his recent investor conference call covering the fourth quarter of 2009. Here is what he said when an analyst asked him about delays in state regulatory processes. Remember that in his previous conference call three months ago, Morris told analysts that everything was hunky dory.
Yes, sure. So transmission is clearly an Achilles’ heel to everybody’s plan for rationalizing the generation fleet for reducing the carbon footprint and for enhancing the green jobs that are associated with sun and wind as we go forward.
So eventually, we’ll get around to the kind of legislation enabling – out of Washington that will allow for all of that to happen. As to our projects, the SPP projects are moving along nicely. The CREZ project in Texas with ETT are moving along rapidly.
The PJM project in particular path is moving along much more slowly than it ought to be. There are many people who just simply don’t want the project to be built and they continue to intervene in any one of a number of jurisdictions, not with an eye toward, “Is this a good idea or bad idea,” just simply that they don’t want to see it built. The PJM continues to follow their own equations and their demand line has gone from 2012 to 2014, maybe even beyond that.
We continue to move forward with our planning, with our dialog with folks along the way rights of way with our investments and the engineering design and rights of way acquisition and many of the things that as you know are already recoverable through the formula.
So we are discouraged by the timeline, but we surely are not discouraged by the need nor are we discouraged that at the end of the day these kinds of facilities will be built and that the American Electric Power will continue to have an opportunity to make some of those significant investments that we talked to you all about over a period of years.
It’s unfortunate that has been a period of years. I started out with the hope that we could begin and finish a project inside of a four or five-year timeline compared to our 18-year timeline for the Jacksons Ferry project. I still believe that we will be inside of a reasonable period of time, but clearly longer than I would like.
Mr. Morris must have really bad staff people. He seems extremely misinformed or uninformed about pleadings filed by intervenors in the MD, VA and WV cases.
If you read this blog, do you believe that PATH opponents “continue to intervene in any one of a number of jurisdictions, not with an eye toward, ‘Is this a good idea or bad idea,’ just simply that they don’t want to see it built”? There is no doubt that we have made a strong case that PATH is simply a “bad idea.” Is Mr. Morris saying that it’s a “good idea” to spend $2 billion of our money on a power line that is not needed?
Can AEP’s CEO really be this detached from reality? Did this guy really get a performance bonus last year?
Oh, and the “green jobs,” “sun and wind” stuff. Come on, Mike. Do you think we’re that stupid? “Rationalizing the generation fleet” means nothing more than preserving your polluting coal-fired monster plants in the Ohio River Valley. “Fleet,” huh? Does that make you the electrical admiral?
And if Mr. Morris can’t bamboozle us with his “green” talk, he will make sure that AEP will be “enabled” by the federal government to crush any opposition to his obsolete transmission projects.
Here is a link to an article in yesterday’s NYT.
It looks like we have a lot of friends in state regulatory agencies:
Many of the state regulators surveyed said they do not believe FERC could adequately balance local costs and needs versus the needs of a few states, the report says.
“State regulators believe almost unanimously that FERC-sited lines will be too expensive. The problem is that FERC is looking at a grand design, the transmission superhighway, which will benefit a few states at the expense of others,” the report says. “And state authorities have little confidence that federal regulators can successfully balance competing needs. As one commissioner simply put it, ‘The feds will bigfoot you.’”
The report also highlights the fact that some national “environmental” groups support FERC’s “bigfooting” while others have generated national opposition to new transmission lines. The report seems to provide a useful tactic of dividing the opposition that power companies could exploit.
But the groups still stress the need to maximize the use of the current grid, cutting demand and energy efficiency before building transmission — although this is a growing area of conflict between local and national environmental groups. Certain incentives, such as FERC’s guaranteed rates of return, could favor building infrastructure, according to members of environmental organizations surveyed.
“Ten years ago, most transmission opposition was local,” Robert Wasserstrom, the study’s principal investigator, said in a statement. “Now we’re seeing national-level environmental organizations taking a more active and strategic role in opposing new transmission projects, primarily those used for coal-generated power. But they could become strong allies in new transmission that they can support,” he said.
Including environmental groups early on in transmission planning will improve transmission projects’ chances of success, similarly to actions in California’s “Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative,” although local opposition may still occur, the report says.
In fact, a number of prominent so-called “environmentalists” are giving unqualified support to new transmission lines. Al Gore and the Center for American Progress have openly advocated a new nationwide “super grid” and want FERC to make it happen.
Early last year, the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government, specifically the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, did not have the power to force extra high voltage transmission lines on state land owners if their own state regulatory agencies ruled against the lines. This ruling applies only to the Fourth Circuit’s area, which includes WV, MD and East Virginia.
The Edison Institute, the national lobbying association of the entire US electricity industry, tried to appeal the Fourth Circuit ruling to the US Supreme Court. Last week, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, so the Fourth Circuit ruling stands.
While the Fourth Circuit ruling allowed FERC to interfere in states to take property if state agencies “withheld approval for more than one year,” this language does not apply to any of the delays of PATH in WV, MD and East Virginia. In all cases, the power companies themselves either withdrew or requested the delays.
Despite the fearful questions by the MD and WV PSCs and the VA SCC, there has been no basis for a power company appeal to FERC because none of the delays have been caused by a state agency’s failure to act. The “one year” clock created by the Cheney administration in the 2005 National Power Act has not even started to run yet, because no state agency has ever caused a delay.
Last summer, WV attorney Charles Printz gave a presentation to the Berkeley County, WV Farm Bureau about how to fight for your rights under West Virginia’s laws concerning eminent domain and land condemnation.
I have just posted a new page that has a link to Mr. Printz’s Power Point slide show with an audio recording of his presentation. Here is a link to the page and the presentation.
If you are a land owner who has been contacted by PATH land agents, you need to watch this presentation. If your friends’ or neighbors’ land is threatened by PATH, send them a link to Mr. Printz’s presentation. They need to see it.
You can always find a link to this page in the right hand column under Pages. The page is titled A WV Lawyer Explains WV Eminent Domain Procedures.
We need to stay alert. The WV Legislature is back in session. The Governor and his minions have been making noises for the past year about how WV needs to “get something” from extra high voltage transmission lines “if they are built.” That is Governorspeak for “I want PATH and TrAIL, and I will push a power line tax to get them built.”
No sign of Gov. Manchin’s tax this year, but it may arrive at any time.
It is depressing that we have to have a defensive legislative strategy to protect the state from dumb ideas, when we should be supporting positive initiatives.
WV legislators will try to tell you that “there is nothing we can do, PATH is in the hands of the PSC.” Don’t let them use that line on you. Educate them about stopping the power line tax and tell them to publicly state their opposition to PATH and TrAIL.
Here are two more ways legislators can help protect our state from AEP/Allegheny’s plans:
- Power companies should be required to give notice to all land owners within proposed transmission line construction corridors when they file applications for certificates of need with the WV PSC. Currently, WV law requires only notice by newspaper ad. The WV PSC jumped the gun in the PATH case and set an early deadline for citizens to file as intervenors in the case. Most land owners had no idea that the power companies wanted to seize their land until after the PSC closed the intervenor process. This needs to change, only a change of WV law will give WV citizens the ability to fight for their land in PSC cases. A land owner notice provision was included in a PSC reform bill introduced in the House last year. I will let you know the number of the new bill when it is introduced this year.
- The December 2009 Blackout in central and southern West Virginia is clear evidence that our state’s power distribution system that serves West Virginians has collapsed. Sen. Truman Chafin has taken the lead on getting the WV PSC to investigate the Blackout. Sen. Chafin should introduce legislation to require the WV PSC to serve only the power needs of WV customers instead of expanding their mandate to the entire PJM region as they did in the TrAIL decision. The WV PSC should serve WV citizens, not out of state corporations or New Jersey power customers. We need investment in our own state’s distribution lines, not new transmission lines to carry power to New Jersey and Maryland.
Here are three simple talking points you can use with legislators if we have to fight the power line tax again this year:
- There is no need to pass a tax now. This is a very complicated issue in a very unstable state and federal environment. Let the PSC have its hearings on PATH this year and rule on the need for the line on its own merits. The PATH start up date has been postponed every year since the line was proposed. It is now on indefinite hold, with no start up date specified.
- In 2008, Allegheny Energy told Gov. Manchin that a WV power line tax will be passed on directly to rate payers in WV. If other states see WV putting a tax on power lines, they will do the same thing, and everyone will be paying higher rates as more and more states tax interstate power lines.
- AEP/Allegheny would almost certainly challenge WV’s power line tax in federal court as a restraint of interstate commerce, which is prohibited by the US Constitution. If the tax was passed and used by Gov. Manchin and the WV PSC to justify approval of PATH, we would be stuck with PATH and the power line tax would be overturned. We would end up with power lines and no tax, and the Governor and AEP/Allegheny would have made fools of the WV Legislature.
There is an excellent story in today’s NYT on a power company in Idaho that is paying customers to reduce peak load. The article will give you lots of good information on peak load management and demand response.
Here is a link to the article.
There is a good graph on page 2 that shows exactly what happens to peak demand with real demand response.
I have never seen any of Aaron Nathans’ work before. His most recent piece on Delaware Online provides an excellent overview of the current situation in MD, VA, WV and NJ.
It looks like MD legislators have copied Gov. Manchin’s power line tax and want to apply it to Dorchester County in Maryland. A bill has been introduced in the MD legislature that applies only to Dorchester County and the MAPP line. Here is a link to the bill.
The really funny thing is that the wording of the bill was directly adapted from the power line tax bill that Gov. Manchin was pushing last year in the WV Legislature.
The multiplier for the tax is $750 per kV rating of the line multiplied by the linear footage of the line multiplied by the kV rating of the line. Oh, yes, and the tax revenue is divided three ways, just like in the WV bill last year.
What is it about the number $750? That must be the magic line that the power companies won’t let the politicians cross. They’ll tolerate up to $750 to get their power line projects approved. It was really funny last year in WV to see the power companies squirming to say that they really did like this tax.
It was very odd to see corporations saying “Tax me, tax me.” That should always be a signal that something is really wrong with a power line tax.
I won’t go into all the reasons why this latest MD effort, copied directly from the Manchin/AEP/Allegheny play book, is a really bad idea. The case that I made on The Power Line exactly one year ago tells you everything you need to know here and here.
The most important thing that power line opponents need to know about power line taxes is that they are specifically designed to bribe local government officials into supporting power lines like MAPP and PATH. There is no tax revenue unless the power lines are built and operating. Local governments are desperate for money right now. You have been warned.
Marylanders who are not familiar with the WV power line tax situation last year, type “power line tax” into the search box on the right and review all my posts from early last year. We stopped this tax. You can too.
WV PSC Chairman Albert Agrees with Power Companies on Blackout Cause Before He Has the Facts
Chairman Albert, as a member of the WV PSC, acts as a judge and finder of fact in cases before the PSC. Why is he making statements to the press, and agreeing with power company PR people about causes of the 2009 WV blackout, before the PSC has investigated the situation?
Here is the editorial from today’s Scranton Time-Tribune in its entirety:
NPS Should Oppose Line
The state Public Utility Commission last week acted for the convenience of PPL rather than in the best interest of the people of Northeast Pennsylvania. It will allow the company to construct a massive, unneeded power line across the heart of the region in order to deliver power to New Jersey.
As noted in a dissent by PUC Commissioner Tyrone Christy, the commission did not require PPL to consider alternatives to the Susquehanna-Roseland power line. Those alternatives include local generation in New Jersey, where the power will be used.
PPL plans to spend $510 million to build the line on a highly circuitous route from its nuclear plant near Berwick, northward across the ridge tops of Luzerne and Lackawanna counties, eastward across Wayne County and then southward through Pike County. PPL chose the route over more direct routes because it already owns the rights of way along much of it.
Power lines will be carried by massive, 180-foot transmission towers that, in many places, will be built over smaller towers on an existing line. The PUC has chosen to look the other way while PPL constructs a mess.
PPL’s favored route also requires construction of the line through the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area before it crosses the Delaware River into New Jersey.
The National Park Service should not be as dismissive of the line’s impact on the national park as the PUC was of its impact on Northeast Pennsylvania. It should conduct hearings on the proposal, keeping in mind that its objective is the preservation of nationally significant natural assets rather than the convenience of PPL.
PPL (formerly Pensylvania Power & Light) is the power company that wants to build the PA section of the Susquenhanna-Roseland line. Here is a link to the edtorial on the Times-Tribune Web site.
The Times-Tribune’s statements sound familiar to us in WV. Apparently, the PUC was not scheduled to issue a decision until some time in February. For some reason (“the convenience of PPL”?), they jumped the gun and issued a decision last week.
The Pennsylvania Utilities Commission (PUC) issued an opinion that accepts the PUC hearing examiner’s recommendation that they approve the PA section of the Susquehanna-Roseland line. Here is a link to a news story about the decision.
The NJ Board of Public Utilities (BPU) also decided Friday to delay its decision at least 30 days to review the impacts of the PJM facts in VA on the S-R case in NJ. Here is a story on the delay.
