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Huge Transmission Line Will Send Oklahoma Wind Power to Tennessee

A deal that would create the largest clean-energy transmission project in the United States was announced, a $2.5 billion effort to build a high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) power line that would take wind energy produced in Oklahoma's windy Panhandle region to the Memphis, Tenn., area.

From Memphis it would be distributed by the Tennessee Valley Authority to other major power distribution systems in the South and Southeast.

The project will be the nation's first to take relatively cheap wind-generated electricity from a region where wind is abundant and carry it for 720 miles into a region where wind power is relatively scarce, explained Michael Skelly, president of Clean Line Energy Partners, a Houston-based company that has four other HVDC projects in the works.

This one, called the Plains & Eastern Clean Line, will be built with private funds and has already received permits for its route from the Department of Energy and regulators in the three states it will pass through.

HVDC technology involves transmission systems built to convert alternating current to direct current. The lines can carry more electricity over longer distances, and then the power is converted back to AC. Technology for the Oklahoma to Tennessee line will be provided by GE Energy Connections, where Russell Stokes, president and CEO of the GE subsidiary, called the project "transformational."

When the line is fully operating, sometime in 2020, it would carry electricity that would cut power plant emissions by 13 million tons of carbon dioxide and reduce the need for 3.4 billion gallons of water that would ordinarily be used to cool nuclear and fossil fuel-fired power plants in the South and Southeast. These units would no longer produce as much of the region's power load.

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