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Day two of David Pecker testimony wraps in NY Trump trial; Supreme Court hears arguments on Idaho's near-total abortion ban; ND sees a flurry of campaigning among Native candidates; and NH lags behind other states in restricting firearms at polling sites.

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The Senate moves forward with a foreign aid package. A North Carolina judge overturns an aged law penalizing released felons. And child protection groups call a Texas immigration policy traumatic for kids.

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Wyoming needs more educators who can teach kids trade skills, a proposal to open 40-thousand acres of an Ohio forest to fracking has environmental advocates alarmed and rural communities lure bicyclists with state-of-the-art bike trail systems.

Plenty of Power – With Nowhere To Go

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Friday, February 22, 2013   

LYONS, Neb. – The way electric transmission lines are built needs to change to take advantage of abundant wind power in the Midwest and Great Plains, according to a new report by the Center for Rural Affairs.

Johnathon Hladik, the author of the report by the rural advocacy group, says the electric power transmission network was not designed to take advantage of wind power. High-capacity lines capable of taking the power from the source just aren't there.

"Only six percent are located in the upper Midwest and the Great Plains, home to our best wind resources,” he says. “Those are the lines over 400 kilovolts. If you look at the lines over 600 kilovolts, less than one percent are sited in those areas."

Hladik says because of this problem, the states with the greatest wind resources are forced to leave a lot of power on the table when it comes to economic development and energy independence. He suggests that utilities need to address this issue to bring more wind energy online and create jobs in rural America.

He maintains the old model doesn't make sense in the 21st century, because the transmission system was designed a century ago to connect huge individual power plants with major population centers.

"We're slowly moving away from coal-fired power plants, and we're moving very quickly towards more of an investment in renewable resources such as wind,” he says. “So, instead of having those big lines serve those big population areas, we need more of those larger lines where our wind resources are the best."

Hladik says of the 3,700 miles of high-capacity electric transmission lines in the nation, only nine miles are located in states that lead the nation in capacity for creating wind energy. He says re-thinking the way high-capacity lines are sited would be a huge step toward building a clean energy future and would create thousands of rural jobs in wind energy generation and transmission.





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