The Wires Beneath the Policy

No statute, however well drafted, moves a single electron. It is the wire, not the law, that finally determines whether power generated in one parish reaches a household in another, and Louisiana's wires are increasingly the limiting factor in a market our policy has otherwise worked hard to open.

The Alliance for Affordable Energy set out plainly this week why the region's transmission network deserves as much legislative attention as any generation or siting question we typically debate. As their analysis details, constraints within MISO's regional grid did real damage to reliability during this winter's Polar Vortex, when demand spiked and the system had little spare capacity to move power to where it was needed. The same constraints have, for years, kept a long queue of low-cost solar and wind projects waiting on interconnection studies that never seem to conclude, while the planning and upgrades that would clear that queue continue to lag behind demand.

This is not a minor technical footnote. It is the practical explanation for why Louisiana can pass favorable siting law, offer competitive incentives, and still watch investment migrate to states whose transmission systems were built, or rebuilt, with foresight. A generator that cannot connect to the grid is a generator that does not get built, regardless of how sound its economics or how welcoming its host parish.

We would ask the Legislature and the Commission to treat transmission planning with the same seriousness given to generation policy, for the two cannot be separated in practice however easily they are separated on a committee agenda. That means supporting MISO's long-range transmission planning process rather than treating it as a distant federal matter, and it means holding utilities accountable for the pace at which they process interconnection requests — a pace that today too often resembles delay dressed as diligence.

Louisiana has the natural resources, the land, and increasingly the developer interest to become a serious player in regional power markets. What it does not yet have is a grid built for that ambition. Correcting that is a decade's work, not a session's, and it begins with treating the wires beneath the policy as the policy itself.

*Seersucker Strategies represents the Gulf States Renewable Energy Industry Association before the Louisiana Public Service Commission and the Legislature on generation, siting, and transmission policy.*