May 2009 Issue

	MISSION TO MADISON
	LINING UP
	EDITORIAL
	Wisconsin Favorites Princeton Flea Market

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Mission to Madison

Co-ops Back Fresh Look at Nuclear Choice

In the early second half of the 20th century, nuclear fission was widely seen as the key to a carefree energy future. Nuclear power plants would provide electricity “too cheap to meter,” the saying went. Using a doctored Gulf Oil Company logo, Mad Magazine’s back cover displayed a parody advertisement with the slogan “Gulp! Say the oil companies,” who were supposedly worrying that the next big thing might be nuclear-powered cars that wouldn’t need to be refueled.

If it was never quite so simple, neither was it ever quite so disastrous as things have been portrayed when, in the predawn hours of March 28, 1979, a mechanical failure compounded by operator error caused the partial meltdown of a reactor core at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Even though no one suffered apparent harm—decades-long medical studies have revealed no elevated incidence of potentially radiation-related illness in the surrounding area—it remains undeniable that TMI was the worst accident in the history of U.S. commercial nuclear operations and it effectively halted expansion of the industry in this country.

Thirty years and two weeks later, electric cooperative leaders meeting in Madison walked up the hill to the state Capitol and asked legislators to consider undoing the 1983 law that rules out new nuclear generation in Wisconsin. Just as in 1979 and before, the circumstances weren’t quite so simple as they might have appeared.

Back to the Future?

Amid the rising controversy over a political response to Earth’s ever-changing climate, old alliances don’t necessarily hold. Greenpeace was created in 1971 not to save whales, but as an anti-nuclear organization. Today its ecologist co-founder, Patrick Moore, campaigns for nuclear power plants as a primary means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. In Wisconsin, the Doyle administration, chilly toward legislative attempts at repealing the nuclear moratorium over the past half-dozen years, now seems firmly on board. In January state Senate Utilities Committee Chairman Jeff Plale (D–South Milwaukee) told electric co-op managers it’s time to change the law that effectively denies Public Service Commission (PSC) authority to approve new nuclear projects.

“We’ve got to look at nuclear,” Plale said. “The PSC can’t even think about it. They can’t even think about thinking about it. [But] if we’re going to be serious about reducing the carbon footprint, that’s a way to do it.”

Dairyland Power Cooperative’s John Parkyn, a University of Wisconsin-educated nuclear engineer, questions “why we have such a low regard” for the PSC’s ability to judge whether it’s prudent to build a nuclear plant, “the same way we trust them to decide whether any other power plant should be built.”

As Wisconsin law now reads, “This one form of generation is off-limits to their consideration,” Parkyn says.

Every sign from the Legislature, the PSC, and the Governor’s Task Force on Global Warming indicates that is about to change. But again, it isn’t quite so simple. Lifting the moratorium will not be followed a week later by someone sticking a shovel in the ground to start building Wisconsin’s next nuclear plant. Pending a broad-based demonstration of interest in new facilities, lifting the moratorium might prove nothing except the questionable relevance of the moratorium itself.

What It Would Take

John Parkyn is a federally licensed nuclear power-plant operator and chief executive officer of Private Fuel Storage (PFS). The PFS consortium was formed by Dairyland and several investor-owned utilities with custody of spent power-plant fuel when it became obvious the federal government couldn’t be relied upon to fulfill its statutory obligation to provide a permanent national storage facility.

PFS is a private-sector alternative. It has a site in Utah and, since February 2006, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to develop and operate it. According to Parkyn, the site could be operational in 30–36 months and has the capacity to hold all the spent fuel now stored in and around power plants scattered across the country. What PFS lacks is a federal permit for improvements to a road into its site, something U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R–UT) has worked hard, and thus far successfully, to block.

Another alternative is recycling: reprocessing spent fuel so it can generate more electricity instead of being stored. “Our nation, our industry has dealt with the issues of spent fuel. We’ve reprocessed successfully like the rest of the world,” Parkyn told co-op leaders at their Education and Lobby Day in Madison early last month.

Though it’s been reversed and reimposed multiple times since, a presidential executive order dating to the late 1970s and issued in fear of nuclear weapons proliferation is why the U.S. is “one of the few nations” not reprocessing nuclear fuel, Parkyn explained.

A bigger hurdle is financing. Over its operational life, the cost of power from a nuclear plant is “hard to beat,” Parkyn said, but getting started is expensive.

“How you fund it is certainly one of its major issues because it takes longer [to build] and it costs more up front,” he said, adding that not even a large utility would be well-advised to take on such a project without multiple partners.

Besides financing, another reason for partnerships is to avoid a single utility system relying too heavily on one generation facility. Owning shares in multiple facilities reduces the impact when a large one unexpectedly goes out of service—a comparatively small risk with nuclear plants nowadays as the national fleet last year delivered a remarkable 92 percent of its rated capacity.

Changing Trends

Lots of things have changed since TMI. Instead of each plant being unique, reactor designs are now standardized, and advanced ones “can go to a safe shutdown without any operator action whatsoever, without any mechanical valve having to change position or anything,” Parkyn explains.

The culture of safety has also changed, with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission demanding “a very high level of training” and requiring “both hardware fixes and human fixes” over the years, Parkyn says. That training and attention to detail is what brought the capacity factor to 92 percent, he adds, noting that in years prior to TMI “it used to be in the 50s because of inadvertent shutdowns.”

Parkyn describes himself as “a rather strong environmentalist” and wonders “why we don’t talk about emissions-free energy.” Nuclear technology “produces two-thirds of the emissions-free energy in America and the bulk of the rest by far is hydro,” he says. “So these are forms of energy that help us deal with emissions certainly at extremely less cost than some of the alternatives in dealing with it.”

What once would have sounded like a lonely voice is a good deal less so today. In March, an annual Gallup environmental survey found six in 10 U.S. adults favoring nuclear-generated electricity. Men were markedly more enthusiastic than women, with a similar difference noted between Republicans and Democrats. But the polling firm reported that each group individually and all of them together recorded their highest levels of support since the survey first posed the question in 1994. —Dave Hoopman

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Lining Up

Renewables require transmission build-out. Who makes the rules?

Last fall this magazine noted a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) study focusing on growing electricity needs in rural America [see “Grid Skid,” Nov. 2008]. That study was released a couple of months before the economy took its nosedive, muddling near-term energy-demand projections. But barring a policy blunder on the scale of the Smoot-Hawley tariff that snuffed world trade and a budding recovery from the Great Depression, the economy won’t stay in recession forever, and the issues addressed in the USDA report will be highly relevant to renewed economic growth.

If anything, ready access to reliable, affordable electricity being a prerequisite to a productive economy, the needs identified in the report take on even greater importance.

Among many other things, the USDA said without upgrades to the transmission grid, brownouts were “probable” in the near future, and while improvements would be costly, “the cost of brownouts could be higher due to interruptions of commercial activity.”

So maybe the hardship of a recession buys extra time to build stronger systems for the future. Whether or not it’s now thinking along those lines, the Agriculture Department is far from alone in seeing a need to build.

New Priorities

Rural U.S. energy needs are not the only factor driving interest in new electric infrastructure. In fact, the greatest demand for large new transmission lines—some larger than the biggest ever built in Wisconsin—may stem from the combined efforts of government and large energy developers to expand production of wind power in the Upper Midwest and deliver it to East Coast population centers.

With more reliance on wind energy not just a popular concept but a practical necessity for utilities complying with state, and soon, federal, renewable energy mandates, geography will increasingly dictate both the location of generation facilities and the long-distance export of their production.

As Jesse Moser of the Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO) recently explained, “Where the wind is, in the middle of the country, there’s not a lot of load.”

Some would say there’s plenty of electrical load in the Midwest, but of course it isn’t a lot compared with the power demands of the metroplex stretching roughly from Boston through New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

Renewable energy developers are proposing to serve that area with wind power, but as Moser says, Virginia isn’t very good for wind generation. Wisconsin is better, he says, and Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas better still.

To act on that knowledge inevitably means new, extra-high-voltage transmission lines from the Dakotas through Minnesota, parts of Iowa, and likely Wisconsin, stretching eastward to the Philadelphia and New York metro areas to feed systems up and down the coast.

Last month, Moser talked about those issues at a Madison forum sponsored by the Customers First! Coalition, an advocacy group for reliable, affordable electricity founded in the mid-1990s by the Wisconsin Electric Cooperative Association, municipal utilities, and others.

His employer, the MISO, operates and dispatches the wholesale electricity market for several states including Wisconsin and participates in joint planning with similar regional organizations serving states east of the Rocky Mountains.

In February, the MISO and its allies spelled out what they think it would take to supply the eastern half of the United States with 20 percent wind energy by 2024. Their Joint Coordinated System Plan said reaching that goal would require 15,000 miles of new transmission lines at a cost of about $80 billion, along with a trillion-dollar investment in new generating facilities.

Even expansion to just 5 percent wind energy by 2024—a scenario labeled in the joint plan as “business as usual with respect to wind development”—was projected to require 10,000 miles of new extra-high voltage lines to accommodate additional generation, with a combined price tag of about $750 billion.

Wisconsin utilities are well on the way to meeting their state-mandated quota of 10 percent renewable energy—as a practical matter almost entirely from wind—by 2015. But other states have mandated 25 percent by 2025 and both Wisconsin and the federal government are almost sure to do the same.

New Markets, New Rules

Assuming they’re satisfied that the costs are justified by the benefits, the next obvious consideration for utility planners and regulatory authorities is how to equitably spread the cost of such ventures, especially with energy prices already on the rise. Moser told the Customers First! gathering that under the 20-percent-by-2024 scenario, who benefits from new infrastructure may be determined by public policy decisions rather than by the load flow or economic factors that have traditionally formed the basis for allocating costs of new transmission facilities.

But there’s something else to be considered, a new twist on the most basic issue in every utility project ever proposed: Who gets to decide what’s built and where?

Eric Callisto, chairman of Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission (PSC), is straightforward about his concern over a federal takeover of siting authority for large transmission projects.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has talked for years about expanding its reach to decisions now made by state regulatory bodies like the PSC, but last month Callisto warned the Customers First! audience that Congress is getting into the act. Senators Harry Reid (D–NV) and Jeff Bingaman (D–NM) have introduced bills that move aggressively toward federal oversight of transmission planning. On the House side, Callisto said, Rep. Henry Waxman (D–CA) treats the issue as “a very small piece” of a wide-ranging energy bill.

The latter approach, Callisto said, “shows, perhaps, an acknowledgement of the difficulty of this issue,” and might be “a good sign that there’s a lot more debate to come on this very important topic down the road.”

There’s every sign he would prefer not just more debate, but lengthy debate. Broader federal authority is promoted on the basis that “we can’t get transmission lines built in this country because state regulators throw up roadblocks,” Callisto says, but he rejects that as a largely false premise.

He says there may be “certain pockets of the country” where states have impeded necessary projects, but that is “simply not accurate in the upper Midwest.” Since 1990 Wisconsin has completed nearly 2,300 miles of transmission improvements, Callisto says, “So we are a part of the country that can get it done when you put your will to it.”

The issue boils down to something more than protecting regulatory turf. If Wisconsin loses its siting authority to the federal government, state residents who won’t necessarily benefit could end up paying for bigger transmission lines than any yet seen in this state.

At least two companies have proposed 765-kilovolt lines crossing Wisconsin to deliver Dakota wind energy to the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland region. The biggest existing lines in Wisconsin carry 345 kilovolts.

Callisto says the proponents have “come up with some snazzy PowerPoints,” but, “No one to date has submitted the kind of granular evidence that would support those large lines, particularly the costs that are associated with them.” The cost, he says, would be $15 to $20 billion.

In January, in a non-specific but apparent reference to those same projects, he told Wisconsin electric co-op managers he was concerned about “a potentially huge new transmission corridor in this state” to carry energy that might do little to serve the needs of Wisconsin residents, and he warned, “Five states are trying to figure out who will end up paying for it.”

Sitting on the hot seat when it comes to passing judgment on utility projects and approving recovery of the costs from ratepayers, Callisto says he does see value in more transmission lines. “They provide optionality at this particularly difficult point in time when we’re not sure exactly where Congress and the president are going to go on climate change issues,” he says, explaining that new lines can afford access to “a variety of generation sources that we might not otherwise have.”

Doing Fine, Thanks

Flora Flygt of the American Transmission Company (ATC) is also attracted to the idea of transmission lines serving more than one purpose. Waukesha-based ATC owns, builds, and maintains most of the transmission system serving Wisconsin, and Flygt told the Customers First! audience new transmission projects “should meet multiple needs.”

Siting decisions should be based on the answers to at least two questions, Flygt said: “Where do we see emerging reliability needs on our system? Where do we see emerging economic needs?”

Federal regulators could be helpful, she said, but it didn’t come across as a ringing endorsement. “[The federal government] could coordinate their agencies and their permitting process,” Flygt said. “There are many federal agencies from which we need to get various permits, so we need a one-stop shop for federal permits because often times federal permitting can add a year or two to the time to build a project.”

Laura McCarten has been Xcel Energy’s point person for the CAPx2020 project, a coordinated effort of 11 cooperative, municipal, and investor-owned utilities. Launched in 2004, CAPx2020 was to figure out what would be needed to meet transmission requirements 16 years in the future and have it ready on time. Most of the activity will occur in Minnesota. Some is proposed for Wisconsin.

McCarten makes it plain that CAPx2020 planners have had markedly different experiences working with state and federal regulators.

“We have had nothing but support and engagement and appropriate attention from our state regulatory agencies,” she told the Customers First! gathering. “We have also found that working with federal agencies can be difficult, sort of balkanized. There is not the same centralization of who’s in charge and what time frames apply and it would be very beneficial if some of that was tightened up.”

Among numerous other projects, CAPx2020 has won regulatory approval to upgrade a 150-mile line into the Twin Cities that, as it stands now, impedes delivery of renewables from points west. With the upgrade, it will allow transfer of five gigawatts (that’s 5,000 megawatts or 5,000,000 kilowatts) of renewable energy.

This spring, ATC obtained authorization to upgrade a line in Wood and Portage counties that’s been a notorious bottleneck constraining delivery of energy, renewable and otherwise, from points west into eastern Wisconsin. Under the right weather and load conditions the old line has even threatened reliability across a multi-state area. Now, with a major new line in place to backstop the precarious connection, an upgrade can proceed without excessive risk of disruptions.

Those things were accomplished working with state regulators in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Stay tuned as more state lines and more jurisdictions—or maybe just one very big one—get into the game.---Dave Hoopman

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EDITORIAL
by Perry Baird

White socks and pleated skirts were in style (top photo) when high school students assembled for the 1965 Youth Seminar. Fashions have changed (lower photo), but youthful exuberance still reigns at the 46-year-old statewide Youth Congress. (Dave Maxwell photo)

Energized Generations

Each spring, electric cooperatives across Wisconsin put out a call for high school students interested in attending a unique educational opportunity. And despite teens’ increasingly dwindling amount of summer free time due to an array of sports, music, and other school-related camps; busy work schedules; and vacations, the co-op’s Youth Leadership Congress annually draws more than a hundred students to the three-day midsummer program.

This year’s event, combining workshop sessions, hands-on activities, and team-building experiences through which students can develop their leadership potential, will be July 15–17 at UW–River Falls.

Electric co-ops pay the program and lodging costs, opening enrollment mainly to sons and daughters of members served by the co-ops, though attendees sometimes come from outside the service areas.

The statewide electric co-op association launched its youth program 46 years ago, tracking closely with national efforts.

Elevating Youth

Six and a half years before becoming president, Lyndon Johnson sparked national awareness for cooperative youth programs, urging electric co-op leaders at the National Rural Electric Cooperative (NRECA) annual meeting in Chicago to “send youngsters to the nation’s capital.” Individual states immediately began sponsoring youth delegations to Washington, D.C., and in 1964 NRECA took over coordinating the various state visits into a national Youth Tour.

How long ago youth programs began at Wisconsin electric co-ops is unclear, but at the local level they certainly pre-date Johnson’s 1957 speech. In fact, 10 high school seniors from Wisconsin, sponsored by Barron Electric Co-op, were actually on hand to hear Johnson make his remarks about encouraging youth.

It was just 11 days after the first consolidated national Youth Tour in 1964 that Wisconsin’s electric co-ops sent 93 students to the inaugural statewide youth program at the River Falls campus. Called “youth seminar” the first two years, the program had many of the same features as today’s conferences: top-notch speakers, educators, and teen peers leading sessions that invite students to explore contemporary issues, creativity, and benefits of cooperative business.

Planting Seeds

Three months before the first Youth Seminar, delegates to the Wisconsin statewide electric co-op annual meeting passed a resolution backing programs for the upcoming generation of co-op members. “We devote our attention and concern to encouraging a lasting dedication to the principles of cooperation among these future owners of our systems,” the resolution stated.

By our count, the years since have brought nearly 7,000 students to the Youth Congress. The oldest among them, now in their early 60s, have seen their own or their contemporaries’ children—even grandchildren—advance through the statewide educational offering.

If you know a young person who would like to share in this heritage, contact your local electric co-op for details on this summer’s Youth Congress.

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These days, many of us are looking for rock-bottom-priced bargains in everyday necessities—or perhaps little unexpected treats that are not budgeted for. Will you spend all your spare moments this season ferreting out these commodities in your area’s bargain stores, or will you invest the time enjoying a refreshing spring day outdoors?

You can track down the bargains while breathing in the balmy breezes at the tree-shaded Princeton Flea Market, the state’s largest weekly outdoor event of its kind. The flea market, boasting more than 180 vendors each week, attracts thousands of shoppers and browsers on Saturdays from late April through mid-October (April 19 through October 10 this year), beginning at about 7 a.m. and closing down at 1:30 p.m.

There, you will find goods, both new and well-worn, to fill your every need. In May and June, Wisconsinites shop there for healthy new flower, herb, and vegetable plants, nurtured in area farms and greenhouses and destined for the shoppers’ own home gardens. Next door to the booth selling seedlings and flowering potted plants, you may find stalls with tools, T-shirts and sweatshirts, books, spices, office supplies, antiques, collectibles, toys, or kitchen items.

If shopping makes you hungry, seek out the vendors who sell homemade bakery items, cheese and sausage, or jams and honey. Later in the summer, locally grown fruits and vegetables are plentiful. Or take a break at the food booth, located in the center of the action and manned by various local service groups. Usually the fare is hamburgers, hot dogs, brats, chicken patties, sodas, milk, coffee, and doughnuts. Some civic groups add their own specialty items to the bill of fare.

In case you’ve done the whole flea market and still haven’t satisfied your appetite for bargains, check out the rest of Princeton’s establishments. The quaint town was named the second-best Festive Shopping Destination in the state by Wisconsin Trails Magazine (November/December 2008 issue). “Historic Princeton is a shopper’s delight,” the article claimed. For shoppers sniffing out antique bargains, Princeton offers lots of alternatives, many of them located on Water Street near the flea market. The largest is Woolbright’s River City Antique Mall, with more than 50 dealers specializing in primitives, collectibles, furniture, glassware, and much more. Other antique shops, such as Jo Von’s Vintage Antiques, are housed in charming Victorian homes.

If it’s newer items you’re after, you’ll find many alluring specialty shops on Main Street, Water Street, and along the highways leading to Princeton. You’ll find stores that specialize everything from ice cream to Amish furniture, jewelry to candles. There’s even a general store called Henry’s that purveys everything from fine wines and specialty foods to snowshoes. The Princeton area also offers a good selection of restaurants and supper clubs.

The charming city also invites visitors to join locals at many special events slated for flea market weekends. For instance, in May alone you could cap off your visit with a Cinco de Mayo Fiesta (May 3), the Princeton Garden Club Spring Plant Sale (May 9), a car show (May 9), citywide garage sales (May 16), and the 7th Annual Rubber Chicken Fling (silliness encouraged in downtown Princeton, May 23).

Now, doesn’t that beat staying home looking in familiar stores for necessary-but-boring bargains? Inject some fun into your life with a bargain-priced weekend fling in Princeton!—Linda Hilton

The Princeton Flea Market runs on Saturdays, 7 a.m. through 1:30 p.m., now through October 10. The event is held in the City Park, on the east edge of town on State Highway 23. Admission and parking are free. Sorry, dogs are not allowed. For further information, visit the Chamber of Commerce at www.princetonwi.com or call 920/295-3877.

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Mission to Madison

Co-ops Back Fresh Look at Nuclear Choice

Lining Up

Renewables require transmission build-out. Who makes the rules?

Energized Generations