Controversy over transmission line construction has some Georgia Transmission Corp. (GTC) officials thinking that public pressure against new power lines is second only to public pressure for more electricity.

That's saying something in a state where the population in the 1990s grew by 26% and energy demand grew by 46%. Although less than 3% of the company's property transactions were heard in court in 2003, and Georgia's not-for-profit cooperative prevailed in nearly every case, the company is proud to point out that it does not hide behind its law firm.

Instead of shrinking from the scrutiny on their siting decisions, company officials added their own scrutiny. Instead of confronting public advocacy groups and community stakeholders, they invited them in.

During the last two years, GTC (Tucker, Georgia, U.S.) took the unconventional step of conducting an examination of its siting process and asking a host of industry, public advocacy and regulatory officials to take part. The siting project resulted in the company having “a more rigorous siting process and some important lessons that can improve the way many utilities make siting decisions,” said the company's interim CEO Mike Smith.

The electric transmission company, owned by 39 of the state's 42 electric membership cooperatives (EMCs), jointly funded and conducted the two-year study with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI; Palo Alto, California, U.S.). A report documenting the effort — The GTC-EPRI Overhead Transmission Line-Siting Methodology — is scheduled to be published this spring. GTC uses the new procedures for evaluating its new power line locations. Two electric utilities in Kentucky have adapted the GTC-EPRI process to their site selection, and other utilities have shown interest.

The GTC-EPRI team consisted of four university professors, legal experts in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Photo Science Geospatial Solutions Inc., and GTC's environmental, engineering and land acquisition professionals. Heading up the team was John W. Goodrich-Mahoney, technical leader and program manager in EPRI's Environment Department, and Georgia Transmission's project managers Gayle Houston and Christy Johnson.

The 39 EMCs served by Georgia Transmission provide electricity to nearly 4 million people, nearly half the state's population. GTC is responsible for about 25% of the state's transmission load. The company owns more than 2600 of the state's 16,000 miles (25,750 km) of lines that are jointly planned and operated by the state's four electric transmission providers. The company currently plans and builds about 100 miles (161 km) of lines each year.

The GTC-EPRI initiative refined and standardized the company's siting process for new overhead transmission lines. The study team used a five-step site-selection process: identify macro corridors; define the project area boundaries; identify the alternative corridors within the macro corridors; identify alternative routes within the alternative corridors; and select a preferred route.

To manage and model the data, the GTC-EPRI team developed an advanced GIS siting model that combines project-specific and off-the-shelf data sets with land suitability analysis techniques pioneered by Ian McHarg in the late 1960s. McHarg's technique, which is commonly used in facility siting, combines geographic data layers into a single, comprehensive suitability map that identifies areas of opportunity and constraint. The team used the GIS siting model to complete the five steps.

• Identify macro corridors

  The process begins with identification of macro corridors, large swaths in a general geographic study area where new transmission facilities are needed. Satellite imagery and databases for roads, slopes, existing transmission lines and the like are screened to determine suitable macro corridors between two endpoints.

• Define project area boundaries

  Outside limits of the macro corridors are defined as the project area boundaries.

• Identify alternative corridors within macro corridors

  This step employs more detailed project data and geographic data, including one-foot aerial photography and digital data for wetlands, floodplains and land use. Using routing algorithms, alternative corridors are identified within macro corridors. Alternative corridors are created in three categories: the built environment, comprising manmade features and people places; the natural environment; and engineering requirements. Scores for the three perspectives are totaled, thus providing a point of reference for comparing alternative routes.

• Identify alternative routes within alternative corridors

  The Siting Process

  The team, using geographic data of much higher resolution, uses the GIS model to produce alternative routes — more narrowly defined areas that could serve as utility pathways — within the corridors.

• Select preferred route

  The site-selection process concludes with the evaluation of the alternative routes to determine a preferred route. Professional judgment is used to rank top route alternatives based on visual concerns, community concerns, potential schedule delays, and construction and maintenance accessibility. The preferred route is defined as the most suitable location for the proposed power line, subject to further physical survey and study of the area.

The suitability of locations is influenced by several factors, including housing density and wetlands. To assign values for each feature, a highly subjective procedure, the GTC-EPRI team organized collaborative decision-making with representatives of federal and state agencies, electric utilities and various conservancy, environmental and public advocacy groups. At five workshops, more than 400 external stakeholders collaborated to determine the values of features and the relative importance of data layers. Avoidance areas, which are particularly sensitive places, were also agreed upon.

Once new siting processes and procedures were established and the GIS siting model was created, the team examined 17 of Georgia Transmission's siting projects to the macro corridor level and seven siting projects down to the preferred route level.

Based on exit evaluations with workshop participants and internal discussions, company officials grouped the important “lessons learned” into three areas: siting process, productivity and savings, and stakeholder collaboration. These and other conclusions will be published in the GTC-EPRI report, and some are published here for the first time.

When the team established its decision-making processes and GIS-based siting software called Corridor Analyst^™, it plugged in the vital information to generate macro corridors for 17 existing transmission line projects. Gayle Houston, GTC's environmental and regulatory coordinator, acknowledged that the team's first attempt to mirror the manual siting process and identify similar corridors did not work well. The team had to reexamine its procedures, processes, data sources and the underlying assumptions that drove its siting decisions.

Trying to turn human thinking into data-assisted human thinking is just as difficult as it might sound, according to Steven French, a project team member and GIS director from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “This project caused us to take a hard look and catalog how decisions are made and the underlying values and assumptions planners often take for granted.”

Since the first transmission lines were planned, engineers have made subjective calls and tradeoffs, such as the relative importance of a line's proximity to buildings and roadsides. In addition, each state has unique requirements, such as Georgia's trout streams being protected with a 50-ft (15-m) vegetative buffer. It is also sometimes hard to get accurate and updated data, particularly information on the state's threatened and endangered species.

John Goodrich-Mahoney, EPRI's full-time representative on the team, cautions utilities that this process does not replace professional judgment but “defines it.”

Productivity and Savings

“This project forced us to determine values for each manmade and natural condition, and rank potential impacts. The project caused us to document and quantify the many judgments we make. In the end, this kind of analysis helps make the siting practice and siting decisions more consistent,” Goodrich-Mahoney said.

Jesse Glasgow, project team member and Photo Science GIS consultant, said that standardizing decision-making processes, databases, selection criteria, factors, weights and values is a laborious and difficult process. But once it's done, he said, “you have something of value.”

To maximize the value of this methodology, Georgia Transmission's officials advised:

• Be willing to revise your company's siting practice.

• Don't expect a panacea for the challenges that come with conducting effective public involvement programs and balancing public interest and expert judgment. Yet some officials said this initiative included collaboration techniques that are a step in the right direction.

As Houston put it, “With this methodology, utilities can change evaluation criteria and weights assigned to factors based on their unique considerations, but the approach remains consistent. This means that companies can point to clearly consistent, documented evaluation criteria and siting methodology. In the end, this means your decisions are backed by more consistent and defendable rationale.”

An unexpected result from the changes to Georgia Transmission's siting process is the cost savings, according to Brad Leathers, senior vice president for Power Delivery. He pointed out that using the GIS siting model and off-the-shelf data typically reduce the study area boundaries, thus reducing the need for more extensive data collection and verification that is time-consuming and costly.

Stakeholder Collaboration

An analysis of eight Georgia Transmission siting projects found an average data-collection cost savings of more than 60%. The estimated cost savings for data acquisition on individual projects ranged from US$12,000 for a small project to more than $130,000. These savings are in addition to productivity improvements in site selection and project scheduling. Georgia Transmission has not determined the overall return on investment related to all changes to its siting practices.

“We believe that having more consistent and defensible positions will translate into additional cost savings for our company and the electric cooperatives we serve,” Leathers added.

One workshop participant said that reducing study area boundaries during the selection of macro corridors is “something that could be easily adopted. Most utilities take two data points and draw a box. Doing a better job defining the study area reduces the size of the study area — and significantly reduces time and cost during data collection.”

An additional benefit of using standard methodology is that routine processes can be automated through computer programming, which reduces the labor required to achieve results. For example, once data are collected and routes are defined, comparative statistics are available with a click of a computer mouse because the evaluation criteria are standard.

Georgia Transmission's siting processes and software will continue to evolve as it is used on more projects. Specifically:

• Conclusion

  The company is developing ways to incorporate factors for aesthetics and the cost and physical requirements for rights-of-way access into the GIS siting model. Although these criteria are indirectly modeled, professionals currently depend on experienced judgment to evaluate these factors.

• The company is evaluating its GIS siting model to determine if it needs to be modified to account for urban, suburban and rural areas or regions of the state.

Acknowledgments

Another benefit of using a GIS-based siting model is that the decision-making process is easier to explain to stakeholders and regulators. The software produces reports that document the criteria and processes used in making a final decision. Also, Georgia Transmission's environmental reports are now based on more consistent information, resulting in a standard template for environmental information.

Use of this process for public involvement received a lot of interest from industry officials during the workshops. Several workshop participants thought the process made siting more transparent. Daniela Hammons of Center Point Energy (Houston, Texas, U.S.) said she felt that “the approach can make the siting process an open book and explainable to the public.”

Each utility must decide for itself to what extent public involvement will be incorporated into its siting process. Another workshop participant from a company in Alabama said, “I think the experts in the industry should route the line, taking into account all impacts. I don't think you want the public or government routing your lines.”

The techniques of calibrating features using the Delphi Process and weighting data layers with the Analytical Hierarchy Process were generally seen as popular tools that utilities could adopt to achieve consensus during public involvement programs.

These processes have proven to be effective decision-making techniques for a wide range of fields. These aren't new techniques. But incorporated into the GIS-based siting methodology, they have proven useful in quantifying stakeholder input.

As important, there was a wide range of interpretations of what the processes and GIS siting model could mean in the legal world.

“There are clearly two schools of thought on that,” according to Georgia Transmission Vice President Jerry Donovan. “Some see the changes as making our decisions more consistent and defendable, and others see it as making the ground more fertile for challenges. These are the types of issues you work through as you make real progress, and we are proud to be out front on these issues. Hopefully, our work here will spur others in the industry to look at what we've done and take other steps to bring about more consistency to how our industry sites lines.”

Georgia Transmission has met its goal of developing a siting model that will illustrate the connection between facts found and choices made, resulting in cost efficiencies and improved productivity. GTC's Smith put it this way, “My real hope is that these new practices and tools will help us demonstrate to others that we are committed to making siting decisions that are consistent and fair. We have really succeeded if our actions help us find better solutions for meeting the electric cooperatives' rapidly changing power needs.”

While the company has seen benefits to productivity, technology and cost, the real end product for Georgia Transmission is “better decisions,” adds Smith. “That may sound a bit mundane, but with today's scrutiny on siting decisions, the consequences in the regulatory, legal and public arenas should be obvious.”

The author would like to extend his appreciation to the following contributors. Jesse Glasgow, a member of the GTC-EPRI team, contributed significantly to this story. John W. Goodrich-Mahoney, technical leader and program manager in EPRI's Environment Department, and Georgia Transmission's Program Managers Gayle Houston and Christy Johnson led the GTC-EPRI research team. Other members were Dr. Joseph K. Berry, Colorado State University; Dr. Steven French, Georgia Institute of Technology; Dr. Elizabeth A. Kramer, University of Georgia; Dr. Paul D. Zwick, University of Florida; Steven Richardson, partner with Van Ness Feldman Attorneys; Chris Smith and Jesse Glasgow, Photo Science Geospatial Solutions Inc.; and Georgia Transmission's environmental, engineering and land acquisition professionals. The GTC-EPRI Overhead Transmission Line Siting Methodology report is scheduled to be published this spring.

Barry Dillon is a public affairs manager for Georgia Transmission Corp. in Atlanta. His 20-year career in journalism and public relations includes assignments as chief of public affairs for the Air National Guard's Environmental Division, principal of a public relations consulting firm and communications director for General Dynamics Electronic Systems. Dillon, who has a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Maryland, has been published in the International Association of Business Communicators' Crisis Communications Handbook and the Federal Facilities Environmental Journal.
barry.dillon@gatrans.com