Real Estate & Property Law

AEP - Transmission Routing

By Alan Ackerman

MSNBC

QUESTION: Can you give an update on whether there are any significant legal or litigation challenges to the line?

RESONSE: Mike Morris, AEP's chairman, president and CEO, "At the end of the day, there will only be, please don't put this in my backyard. ... But I don't think you're going to find any significant legal challenges that will delay any of that activity. Once you receive final authority from the (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), which we have, and ultimate authority from the states and the alignments, then you move into an eminent domain world where the argument really gets down to what's my property worth, and there are long-standing methods to take care of that.

"But we are routing around the kinds of things that would cause some long-term delay. The day of getting your straightedge out and laying a transmission line out are long gone. We know how to avoid historic sites, environmentally sensitive areas, public areas where people don't want us to be. We learned a lot of lessons over a lot of years, but we are much better at routing transmission lines."   

AEP is one of the largest utilities in the Midwest, if not the country.   This is a frank analysis outlining two major concepts.  First, utilities like AEP are doing their best to acquire in the path of least resistance.  Second, once an owner provides the right of way, given the environmental constraints, the owner is likely to be visited by the next utility as well.

Full post as published by National Eminent Domain Blog on August 13, 2009 (boomark / email).