Frontlines

Those new merchant gen plants must wait in line to get on the grid, and they don't like it.

They say that competition reigns in electric generation. Yet, when a private power developer draws up a blueprint for a new gas-fired plant, and starts looking for lenders to supply the funding, that developer first must drop on bended knee to ask permission to connect the plant with the utility-owned transmission grid.

That's not right, says the Electric Power Supply Association, the nation's trade group for power producers. EPSA's policy director Julie Simon spelled it out in a letter she mailed in February to the Office of Markets, Tariffs and Rates at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission:

"One EPSA member company recently waited over three months for a utility to acknowledge receipt of an interconnection request.

"Another member was told it would take 18 months for the utility's overburdened staff to get to their request. When this developer offered to pay the cost for an outside engineer of the utility's choosing to conduct the necessary studies, the utility declined, stating its preference for using its own staff.