by Ed Merriman Dec. 4, 2009 http://www.bakercityherald.com/Local-News/Idaho-Power-schedules-public-meeting-set-for-Dec-17
After a series of fall meetings in Grant and Harney counties, Idaho Power officials are preparing to resubmit plans to the Bureau of Land Management for building a 500-kilovolt transmission line with proposed routes across Baker County.
Kent McCarthy, Idaho Power’s community advisory process leader, said meetings in Grant and Harney produced no new or alternative routes for building the proposed Boardman to Hemingway transmission line through those counties.
“These weren’t routes that were proposed by Idaho Power. They were proposed by a central project team representing Baker and Union counties, and the southern team in Malheur County,” said Piper Hyman of Idaho Power corporate communications.
McCarthy said meetings were held over the past two months in Burns, John Day and Mount Vernon after the central and southern project teams made a proposal in September to shift the proposed transmission line from Malheur, Baker and Union counties to an alternate route across Harney and Grant counties.
He said the meetings were well attended (a total of about 25 people at Burns and 70 at the John Day and Mount Vernon meetings), but instead of presenting alternative routes, residents of Harney and Grant counties presented arguments against putting the proposed transmission line across their counties.
Due to the higher projected cost and greater length for a transmission line across Harney County, McCarthy said locals felt it would be better to pursue a shorter and less costly route across Malheur and Baker counties.
McCarthy said locals argued that the potential environmental damage, including damage to wildlife habitat, should rule out any route across Grant County.
“I don’t want to say they said ‘not in my county,’ ” McCarthy said. “We are not trying to pit county against county. They gave us some very well thought out reasons” for opposing building the transmission line across Grant and Harney counties.
“We don’t know what to do next over there, since there were no routes or route adjustments” proposed by representatives of the local government, landowners, community members and environmental groups who attended the meetings in Grant and Harney counties, McCarthy said.
Idaho Power cancelled a Wednesday meeting in Baker City and rescheduled it for 4 p.m. Dec. 17 at the Best Western Sunridge Inn.
That meeting will update Baker-area residents on the Grant and Harney meetings, and provide details of an analysis being completed by TetraTech engineering consultants on some 45 potential segments for the proposed Boardman to Hemingway transmission line.
“The analysis hasn’t been completed yet, but we didn’t want the (Baker-area) team members to go a long time without knowing what the status was,” McCarthy said. “We will have some analysis to present on each individual section of the transmission line.”
“We invite people to the team meetings, but anybody who shows up is welcome. We put the names on the list of anyone who shows up at a meeting, and send them notices and invitations to future meetings, so the teams tend to grow,” he said.
In addition to information on siting the transmission line, McCarthy said TetraTech has also collected the data and has completed much, but not all, of its analysis of the northern route through Umatilla and Morrow counties.
Due to opposition that surfaced last spring, Idaho Power withdrew its original transmission line application with BLM in May, as well as a National Environmental Protection Act review.
McCarthy said the original transmission line application was withdrawn in part to consider suggestions from the counties.
Idaho Power has approximately 470,000 customers in Idaho and 19,000 customers in Eastern Oregon, mostly in Malheur County and the southern part of Baker County as far north as Durkee.
McCarthy said the transmission line has been proposed to bring energy from the Boardman area and other parts of the Northwest into the Boise area and southern Idaho, and to increase the electricity carrying capacity of the Northwest power grid, which carries power back and forth between the California/Nevada region and the Northwest.
“I can’t say we aren’t building this transmission line to transmit energy to California,” McCarthy said.
He said the transmission line is needed to accommodate energy transmission both ways, since power from California is transmitted to the Northwest during those seasons when demand in this region is higher, and in turn power generated in the Northwest during the spring and summer is transmitted to California.
McCarthy said the power grids that allow the transmission of power along that route and into Southern Idaho are nearing full capacity, and the proposed Boardman to Hemingway line is needed to accommodate projected growth in energy demand.
Getting residents and project teams from different areas to agree on where the transmission lines should be routed, however, has cost the company millions of dollars and taken longer than expected. McCarthy said Idaho Power has had to extend it’s projected completion timeline from 2013 to 2015.
With a tentative goal of resubmitting the transmission line route applications to BLM, the Oregon Energy Facilities Siting Council and to a NEPA review, Hyman said Idaho Power is planning to present route analysis and mapping information to local project teams during January.
The goal is hone in on a primary route and a secondary route by the end of January, and then submit new applications on those routes in February, if possible.
She said the purpose of the local project teams is to “leverage the expertise and knowledge of people living in these areas, who know where farmland and environmentally sensitive areas, and wildlife habitat are, so we can adjust the (proposed transmission line routes) to accommodate that.”
Hyman said this is the first time she is aware within the current environmental era where a project of the scope of the proposed Boardman to Hemingway transmission line has been proposed.
“People weren’t as outspoken in the past as they are now,” Hyman said. “It’s a different world, and probably better for that.”
