Planning Begins For New Power Lines

BROOKSVILLE - If the process goes as Progress Energy hopes it will, a new nuclear power plant in Levy County will come online in 2016.

The planning for how to get that power to 10 of the fastest-growing counties in the company's service area has already begun, however.

The company is considering a roughly one-mile swath of land in west central Hernando County as a potential north-south corridor for transmission lines, according to a company spokesman and county residents familiar with the planning.

However, the area is wider than that in some spots, as the lines might need to deviate east or west from the corridor to accommodate obstacles such as existing or planned development.

Several Hernando County residents are part of a committee drafted by Progress Energy to help narrow down the corridor to a specific route. It is a potentially contentious process that company officials say they are trying to make as open and inclusive as possible.

The committees include local planners, elected officials, environmentalists, engineers and other residents to get a diverse range of input, said company spokesman Buddy Eller.

"We wanted to engage the community early in the process," Eller said. "You want to have collaboration, and you want to be transparent."

The plant is proposed for a 3,000-acre site located roughly seven miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico and about eight miles northeast of the company's existing power plant in Crystal River, Eller said.

The company will have to run some 200 miles of transmission lines from the plant to meet a burgeoning demand for electricity in the region.

The company expects a 25 percent hike in demand in the next decade and an additional 1.7 million customers, Eller said.

Among the 23 counties the company serves are Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco, Polk, Citrus, Sumter, Lake and Marion counties, in addition to Hernando and Levy counties.

Those counties are the ones projected to see the biggest increase in demand and need for more transmission infrastructure, Eller said. The company sought out residents in that 10-county region to sit on three committees of roughly 20 people.

One committee is comprised of residents from Hernando, Pasco and Citrus counties.

Among the Hernando residents are community activist Janey Baldwin; Nick Nicholson, a Brooksville engineer; and David Miles, a county planner.

Progress Energy plans to a series of "open house" meetings in the coming months at which it will unveil maps that show the potential corridors in the three study regions, Eller said.

He stressed that the company is "very early" in the process.

But the committees have already met in Citrus County, once in October and once this week, to discuss some possible options in their respective areas. A published report summarizing a brainstorming session during the October meeting reveals potential pathways and some advantages and pitfalls of each.

One potential option is to run the lines completely or at least partially along one of the company's existing utility lines in Hernando, a process called co-location.

It was among the chief recommendations of the community committees.

"That's something we look hard at," Eller said.

One of the existing lines enters the county at the Citrus County line near the Suncoast Parkway and runs south to a substation at Brookridge before continuing through Spring Hill.

A second, smaller line runs a couple of miles west of that one, also through Spring Hill.

Though co-location seems the most obvious and easiest alternative, there are other considerations, such as available space in the corridor, Eller said.

The additional infrastructure could require more than simply installing more cable on existing towers or poles, but rather could mean the construction of new structures, Eller said.

The Suncoast Parkway, both the existing stretch and the proposed extension into Citrus, also is a potential pathway.

So, too, is County Road 491, or Citrus Way, just east of the parkway.

But the committee noted that the Suncoast has been designated a scenic highway, a designation that could foil plans to run towering steel structures along the roadway.

Those towers along the parkway could become a safety issue near Spring Hill Drive, where the toll road passes near Hernando County Airport, the committee surmised.

That consideration is a chief concern for Miles, the county planner and committee member.

Miles said his role as a county representative is to make sure Progress exhausts any options to run along its existing corridors first.

"We're just trying to steer them to the existing right-of-way and away from the parkway," Miles said.

He noted that the Suncoast Parkway could one day be a corridor for mass transit, and the installation of power lines could complicate or preclude that.

Progress Energy is going about the process in "a very productive way," Baldwin said.

But Baldwin said she and other committee members warned company officials that they need to be ready to answer the inevitable questions, such as the potential dangers of power lines to nearby residents and how the power lines would affect the land on which they are installed.

The company's goal is "to minimize the impact on the environment," Eller said.

Joe Murphy, speaking on behalf of the Florida program coordinator for the Gulf Restoration Network, is wary.

Murphy attended the October meeting and said he got a sense the goal was to recruit "cheerleaders" for the power plant project.

As for the requisite transmission infrastructure, "You got the distinct impression that they're looking to do this as cheaply and easily as possible, and oftentimes the way to do that is through public lands," said Murphy, who also is conservation chair for Hernando Audubon, which he said has similar concerns about the possible impact to the environment.

"Progress Energy should know that any proposal that impacts public lands is going to be fought tooth and nail by environmental groups in Florida," he said. "They play lip service, but at the end of the day they are a for-profit corporation, and for-profit companies take the path of least resistance. We'll see."