Editor in Chief Rick Bush received the following letter in response to his editorial “Redefining Transmission,” which appeared in the May 2002 issue of Transmission & Distribution World.

Dear Rick,

I read your interesting article on reliability and the possibility of nationwide reporting standards. You are right. Having standards is crucial if we are to measure performance. As you know, I left the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) in 1998 when it decided it did not need engineering managers because it was were only going to be a “wires” company.

While I was still at LADWP, I developed the SAIFI and SAIDI reporting system, and was involved in extensive discussions on what events were to be included in the raw data. For example, we decided not to include the outages related to the L.A. riots, earthquakes and the one bad flood we had. As such, it is not only important to develop standards, but if the metrics are to have any meaning, we must understand the “events” that are being deliberately omitted that may skew the findings.

Your article describes your discussions with Phil Pettingill from the ISO and the definition of transmission systems. At LADWP, we defined our 230-kV loop system as “distribution” to maintain local control, even though many utilities automatically classify 230-kV as transmission.

Finally, my present employer, Gateway Science and Engineering, is working on the development of a new 500-kV ac transmission line from Palo Verde through Imperial, to Devers, California, with a connection to Mexico. We've identified an interesting attitude on the part of the owners of the new generation under construction.

As you may know, because of all the new generation in Arizona, Southern California and northern Baja, California, studies that include all generation under construction in this area have shown a projected transmission capacity shortfall on the WSCC East-of-River path of about 1400 MW. This possibly could result in the system being pushed beyond its reliability limits, with generation being stranded within pockets, increased losses, higher delivered energy costs, and wasted fuel and lost income.

We found regional entities performing studies in their own area without reference to what was going on in neighboring regions. In addition, developers were planning projects without a detailed examination of transmission issues, including the impact of other projects in the area.

When we raised this issue at the recent Western Area Transmission System meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, the generators said it was not their problem: “Someone will build the necessary transmission capacity to the energy markets.” Wow! This is the same situation that we had in California with generation shortages and high energy costs.

When the “obligation to serve” was removed from the IOUs, the distribution companies responsible for delivering electricity to existing customers under fixed rates were told not to worry about where the generation would come from: “Someone will build generators and supply the power.”

This might be an interesting story to research, if you have not already done so. Keep up the good work!
Fernando Calderon
Vice President
Gateway Science and Engineering