CapX Brookings/Myrick route good for something!
When the Applicants added the Myrick route, oh-so-improperly at the very end of a long proceeding when they saw they couldn’t get their way due to DOT easements, it was excruciating. Successfully defeated, but excruciating because it was so wrong, so ham handed, and yet accepted by the judge and the Public Utilities Commission.
So then they proposed a similar route for a smaller transmission line, the Tyrone line, years later. What? Whatever were they thinking? Apparently they weren’t, and it doesn’t seem they knew about “Myrick” and anything that had come before.
GREAT recap of the first Planning Commission meeting here:
Well, this is a subject I know all too well, and I’ve been brought into this Tyrone 69 kV transmission and substation proceeding at Le Sueur County. Way too familiar. The thing about this that’s NOT been made clear is that the utilities snuck in a big honkin’ substation and attached it to the Wilmarth line. There was a plan to connect the CapX 2020 Helena sub to Wilmarth, and to link that to the St. Thomas substation, but though they did build the Helena sub connecting CapX with Wilmarth, there was no line to St. Thomas to the south. Instead, and how they did this is beyond me, they built a brand new unplanned-for substation, called the Shea’s Lake substation, and connected that to St. Thomas. Had to have cost at least $15 million. ??? Where did that come from?
So back to this Tyrone project at Le Sueur County. Emily Pollack had intervened in the proceeding, allowed under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act, and now I’m representing her in this, and we just sent out some information requests and will see what we can see:
There’s good stuff in the Attachment Binder, particularly the North Mankato Load Serving Study and the Biennial Transmission Plans showing their plans for local load serving. Without the basic information on this project, there’s no basis for a decision by the County.
But here’s the rub — they built this new Shea’s Lake substation to serve the Le Sueur and Le Center areas, so folks, that’s the substation that should be used! No excuse to build it for this purpose, and then not use it!
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