SANTA FE, N.M.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tres Amigas, LLC today announced that it received responses at a hearing on March 18, 2010 on the regulatory filings it submitted with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) regarding the Tres Amigas SuperStation. FERC’s orders were as follows:

• The Commission granted Tres Amigas approval to sell transmission services for the SuperStation at negotiated rates.
• The Commission stated that, upon receipt of an application under Federal Power Act sections 210 and 211, it could issue orders pursuant to those sections to allow Tres Amigas to proceed and interconnect with ERCOT without conferring FERC jurisdiction over ERCOT utilities.

At the hearing on March 18, FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said, “This project, which is the first of its kind, will allow customers to trade power across the interconnections and to take advantage of opportunities to buy lower cost power from other regions. It may also open a new transmission path for customers interested in tapping the vast renewable energy potential in many parts of the country – Texas, the Southwest, the West and Northwest, the Southeast and the offshore Atlantic… Tres Amigas is a prime example of the creativity and pioneering thinking that our country needs to expand the ability of the transmission grid to reliably accommodate all sources of electricity generation, including renewable energy.”

“We are pleased that 56 different parties submitted letters of support to FERC for the Tres Amigas SuperStation,” said Phil Harris, Chief Executive Officer of Tres Amigas LLC. “After years of engineering design and development, achieving this approval is a key milestone to advancing the development of Tres Amigas. We are now in the process of reviewing the directions that FERC has provided with regard to ERCOT. We will be pursuing strategies to achieve the requisite disclaimer of FERC jurisdiction over ERCOT within the confines of the FERC order to provide Texas citizens with the opportunity to benefit from the cost advantages of a broader market. In addition, our team will be focusing in the weeks ahead on negotiating interconnection agreements with transmission companies, finalizing agreements with ‘anchor tenants’ for the SuperStation, raising additional financing for the next phase of our project and issuing RFP’s for HVDC converters and storage batteries.”

The SuperStation will be located in Clovis, New Mexico and will for the first time provide the capability to transfer thousands of megawatts of power between the three U.S. power grids – or “Interconnections” – known as the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection and the Texas Interconnection (also known as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT).

Similar to highway rotaries or roundabouts used for traffic flow control, multiple power transmission lines from each of the Interconnections will feed power into and out of the Tres Amigas SuperStation through Superconductor Electricity Pipelines from American Superconductor Corporation (NASDAQ: AMSC). The SuperStation will help ensure the efficient and reliable flow of power from multiple generation sources in all three power grids to customers across a wide area of the U.S. Tres Amigas aims to meet the need for new transmission infrastructure that can enable the nation to maximize its tremendous wind, solar, hydro and geothermal renewable energy assets.

About Tres Amigas, LLC

Tres Amigas, LLC is uniting the nation’s electric grid. Utilizing the latest advances in power grid technology, Tres Amigas is focused on providing the first common interconnection of America’s three power grids to help the country achieve its renewable energy goals and facilitate the smooth, reliable and efficient transfer of green power from region to region. Tres Amigas, LLC is a merchant transmission entity composed of electric utility industry operational, technology and thought leaders. More information is available at http://www.tresamigasllc.com.

Contacts
Tres Amigas, LLC
Adrienne Harshman, 505-428-6374
aharshman@tresamigasllc.com