Here in Pennsylvania, public hearings have started with respect to the proposed Trans-Allegheny Interstate Line, and media coverage is racheting up.  While I was not in Pittsburgh for Day One of the hearings, it would appear that a number of protestors were:

A steady stream of protestors from Stop the Towers, a grass-roots citizens group, picketed in front of the [State Office] building for most of the day, while the state Public Utility Commission began a three-week hearing inside to gather technical evidence regarding Allegheny Power's application to construct a 37-mile, 500-kilovolt electric transmission line. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 25, 2008

The inevitable protests may tend to obscure the fact that one way or another, this line and others are likely to be built.  Those "towers" are going up-- eventually.  But plenty of political angst will be sown along the way.  How we get there and when we get there remain to be seen.

EPAct 2005 and the high likelihood of federal pre-emption in the event that states do not approve the construction of high-voltage transmission lines (blessed by DOE and PJM) are "inconvenient truths" that the general public may be barely aware of.  Still, we will go through this hearing exercise which is pre-ordained by both the requirements of due process and the regulators' keen instinct for political survival.  "The people" will have their day in court, after which the PA PUC will have to sort it all out.  God help them.

I cannot help but contrast this event with the doomed effort to run a transmission line from the Pittsburgh area to TMI back in the early 1990s.  That proposal generated tens of thousands of protests and volumes of testimony on EMFs.  The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission would have had to deal with that record but for the fact that the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities saved PA PUC the agony on that occasion by killing the project.

This time, it won't be that easy, and the PA PUC will be faced with the hard necessity of making a decision to allow the line to be built or to face federal pre-emption.  There is very little political "upside" to this.  Approve the line and face the vocal wrath of Pennsylvanians who want no change (not now, not ever), or get pre-empted (and publicly embarrassed) by the Feds who are more concerned with the strength of the grid than they are about the aesthetic and health sensibilities of the natives.

I'm betting on pre-emption, because EPAct 2005 neatly set FERC up as the Villain of the Piece.  But I could be wrong, and here is why.  PJM has lost a lot of "face" with the states over the past few years with its mishandling of the inauguration of RPM and then the Market Monitor controversy, but PJM is still perceived as the first line of defense for system reliability.  It's one thing to defy the feds (DOE and FERC) when they threaten to tell a state to "run that line."  It's quite another to say "no" to the RTO that kept the lights on August 14, 2003.  By defending the line as both a reliability as well as an economic necessity, PJM plays a powerful card.  PJM says the line is needed for reliability purposes.  That testimony is pretty hard to ignore.

Either way, the state regulators are caught in the middle.  Deal with the angry calls of infuriated citizens and their state representatives now, or deal with those calls when the lights go out at some point in the future.