Looks Like I Made Someone Twitchy

Story Here:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7626158.html

My response:

I would like to begin by thanking John Kellum for responding to my article "Here Comes Another Texas Land Grab." Open and honest debate is indeed part of the process which makes our country and our state a great place.

As I read his article, it became apparent to me that Mr. Kellum and I are speaking at two different frequencies. Most of his article centers on CenterPoint’s fulfilling of the law governing such projects. My article focused upon the ethics of such projects. CenterPoint is indeed fulfilling the legal requirements of putting together its desire to build this transmission line, but the real deep down question is: is this project ethical?

I would argue such a project would indeed be ethical if CenterPoint could prove there is a definite need for electrical power for the city of Houston. Can this be shown?

The review documents submitted to ERCOT’s meeting on August 17, 2010 state, "It should be noted that the need to add additional import capacity into the Houston area was not considered to be necessary to meet reliability criteria in the timeframe of this analysis (2014) since the load in the area could reliably be served by generation in the Houston area and the existing import capacity."

The same document states there MAY be a need for further power in 2018. However, this is not based upon hard data, but assumptions regarding growth.

Therefore, we can conclude there is no immediate need for extra power for quite some time.

Mr. Kellum would like to tie the rolling blackouts the state experienced in the winter of this year to this project. He seems to indicate the cause of the blackouts came from an inability to move electricity from where it was generated to where it was needed. Yet, on the Chronicle’s own website

(http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/02/02/texas-cold-snap-leads-to-rolling-blackouts/)

and according to Reuter’s

(http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/02/us-ercot-rollingblackots-idUSTRE7116ZH20110202),

 the blackouts were not caused by an inability to get electricity from one place to another. They were caused by a disruption of production which was concurrent with a spike in need. Simply put, the grid was more than capable of getting the juice where it needed to go–there just wasn’t enough juice being produced. I don’t know if Mr. Kellum intentionally left this important piece of information out of his article, but I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Thus, we can see from these two parts of the puzzle, there is no reliability issue with either power generation or the grid. So, what is the justification for this project given by CenterPoint and endorsed by ERCOT?

As I stated in my first article, cost savings. Again to quote the review, "For this reason each of the project alternatives were evaluated on economic criteria based on the ERCOT RPG Planning Charter and Procedures in order to evaluate each project’s ability to reliably serve the load at an overall lower cost."

That’s correct, cost savings alone. There is no other justification. Unfortunately, Mr. Kellum does not rebut any of my arguments regarding whether or not cost savings is enough to ethically justify building these lines. Perhaps in his next article.