Legalectric

With all these transmission proposals from hell announced, I think we’ve got to take a step backwards, and go through JCSP, the source of an insane “plan” for transmission across the U.S.  JCSP is “Joint Coordinated System Plan,” which is MISO, PJM, SPP, TVA, and MAPP, getting together and fantacizing about transmission.   This has nothing to do with need, with whether there’s a market, with whether it’s in the public interest, it’s what they want.

The NYT “Green Blog” had a post about this a couple of days ago that got this completely wrong, as you can see from the headline:

An Ambitious Vision for Upscaling Wind Transmission

EARTH TO MARS — IT’S NOT FOR WIND.

Here’s a NYT “Green Blog” snippet with a look into the JCSP’smotivation (click for the whole thing):

The Joint Coordinated System Plan, as it is called, has been in development for months, according to the Midwest Independent System Operator, which is steering the project — and the full report will not be ready until the fall. But details of the plan were revealed on Monday in order to coincide with debate over the stimulus bill.

Yes, the stimulus bill.  There’s a lot of money in that stimulus bill for transmission, and there’s NO money in the market for building transmission, or anything for that matter — remember, CapX 2020 was hustling Lehman Bros. for money, so it’s possible CapX won’t be built anytime soon.  There they go to the government trough…

JCSP has it’s own site, just a contact form, with no contact information on it whatsoever, other than links to “the participants.”

Joint Coordinated System Plan Site

Here’s their “plan” for transmission across the US:

JCSP Report – Executive Summary

So let’s see, we’ve got CapX 2020, MISO’s MTEP, the JCSP dream/nightmare plan, the Green Power Express… and they keep trying to couch their market dreams into wind, needed for RES.  Can’t beople do a little background checking before they jump on this bandwagon?  Can’t they do their due diligence like NYISO and ISO-NE?

Feb 4 2009 NYISO & ISO-NE Letter to JCSP

DUH!  There’s no market.  This is such arrogance on the part of MISO…