Aligning Environmental Stewardship and Transmission Planning
Key Highlights
- Utilities are investing heavily in new transmission infrastructure to enhance reliability, resilience, and sustainability amid climate challenges and rising energy demands.
- ATCO Electric’s project in Jasper National Park demonstrates the benefits of using tree wire systems to reduce wildfire risk and minimize environmental impact while maintaining reliable power delivery.
- The Hendrix 69-kV tree wire system allows for reduced right-of-way clearance, less tree trimming, and supports environmental conservation efforts, including carbon sequestration.
- Environmental stewardship is now a key factor in transmission planning, balancing infrastructure needs with wildfire prevention and ecological preservation.
- Innovative solutions like tree wire systems exemplify how utilities can meet operational, environmental, and regulatory goals simultaneously.
It may be unusual to hear the terms “environmental stewardship” and “transmission planning” in the same sentence, but that’s changing. A 45-kilometer deployment of 69-kV transmission line through an environmentally sensitive area has preserved trees and worked to reduce the risk of wildfires. Utilities considering 69-kV projects are starting to take notice.
Over the next few years, utilities will invest tens of billions of dollars to build new transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure across North America. This buildout is taking place amid a generalized and growing concern about sustainability, resiliency and rising energy prices.
The T&D buildout is being driven by several factors, including the need to rebuild infrastructure following severe weather, efforts to harden existing electric infrastructure against severe weather, and bringing vast new amounts of renewable electricity from remote areas where it is generated to areas where it will be used. Utilities, prodded by state utility regulators, are making T&D investment decisions based on numerous factors, including reliability and affordability. Across Western North America, wildfire prevention also is a significant factor in decision-making.
The mandate facing electric utilities is no longer limited to providing reliable service at an affordable price. Increasingly, operating sustainably and with greater resiliency have been added to utilities’ longtime mandate. Operating sustainably has many elements, including protecting the environment, minimizing risk of wildfires, and balancing customers’ love of trees with the need to maintain right of way (ROW) clearance to prevent trees from coming into contact with lines and causing power outages.
ATCO ELECTRIC’S CHALLENGES—AND SOLUTIONS
ATCO is a publicly traded Canadian energy, housing, transportation, and infrastructure solutions company based in Calgary, Alberta. ATCO’s electric utility, ATCO Electric, transmits and distributes electricity to about 229,000 customers in northern and east-central Alberta.
Brent Prickett, ATCO Electric’s manager of transmission lines and civil engineering, said, “When we energized 45 kilometers (about 28 miles) of 69-kV radial line through the Jasper National Park in 2019, it brought us two significant environmental benefits: Reduced risk of originating wildfires and being able to operate with a reduced tree-clearance right of way.”
ATCO Electric was drawn to the Hendrix 69-kV tree wire system because it reduced ROW clearance needs and thus the need for tree trimming. As a heavily forested national park in a nation with a highly developed environmental sensibility, Jasper National Park was not particularly accessible to vegetation management trucks and crews.
“In general, we can secure sufficient ROW width to remove vegetation contact risk,” Prickett said. “But in Jasper National Park, Parks Canada required us to limit our impact to vegetation, so we needed to search for a non-traditional solution.”
ATCO Electric selected Hendrix’s tree wire system for its 69-kV transmission project. That system allowed ATCO Electric to string the new lines with less ROW clearance for trees. Utilities typically require 15 meters of clearance (7.5 meters on each side of a 69-kV line) to allow for tree trimming and to guard against the line coming into contact with trees during storms and high winds. But the Canadian government only provided 10 meters of clearance (five meters on each side of the line) for the Jasper project.
“We are trimming less trees and protecting the foliage in Jasper National Park because we deployed the Hendrix aerial covered conductor system in a tree wire configuration,” Prickett said.
In addition to the aesthetic benefits, there’s a climate change benefit: Leaving more trees standing allows them to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while providing oxygen via photosynthesis. In that way, trees function not only as the earth’s lungs but also as its liver, removing harmful materials from the environmental body. Some have called trees nature’s carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) system.
Installing a tree wire system cost ATCO Electric somewhat more than a bare wire system would have cost, but far less than an undergrounding option. But a bare wire deployment would not have worked in the heavily forested area, as bare wire systems are more susceptible to not only faults from contact with birds but are also more prone to wildfire ignition as a result of tree contact or falling to the ground and throwing sparks onto dry brush.
Prickett commented: “The Hendrix tree wire system really is an ambassador for itself. It’s a great product, really a flagship. We had unique needs and constraints in the Jasper National Park, but the attributes that made the tree wire system the right choice for our project also apply to other settings.”
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