Our next NWCC Transmission Update Briefing will take place on Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 1:00 PM Eastern (12:00 CT / 11:00 MT / 10:00 PT).

The Center for Advanced Energy Studies’ Energy Policy Institute (EPI) is leading a team of researchers from Boise State, Idaho State, and the Idaho National Laboratory in an innovative project to visually integrate public opinion and geospatial and environmental data to aid in decisions regarding transmission line route selection and siting. The premise of the project is that an important policy focus should be on improving performance within the existing legal permitting and siting framework, rather than continued proposals to preempt existing siting authorities. Initiated in June 2010, the 3-year project is designed to develop an open-source, visualization decision support tool that will enable policymakers, developers and stakeholders to identify potential optimized transmission paths and a map that delineates areas according to risk based on public survey data. The decision support tool will complement existing tools of developers, not replace them. In addition, the methodology developed can be applied to other energy infrastructure, including generation sources.