VELCO tells House committee Vermont must balance transmission upgrades and non‑transmission alternatives

Shanna Lisonbee, a spokesperson for the Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO), briefed the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee on Jan. 24 about VELCO’s role as the state’s transmission utility, the findings of its 2024 long‑range transmission plan and several projects and initiatives underway or under study.

VELCO is “the transmission utility in the state of Vermont,” Lisonbee told the committee, and is owned by the state’s 17 distribution utilities and the Vermont Low Income Trust for Electricity (VLITE). She said VELCO operates about 740 miles of transmission lines, roughly 1,600 miles of privately owned fiber optic network, about 55 substations and manages roughly 14,000 acres of rights‑of‑way. VELCO employs about 80 people and, Lisonbee said, was one of Vermont’s larger property taxpayers in 2024, paying about $31.8 million in property taxes.

The long‑range transmission plan and why it matters

VELCO publishes a Vermont long‑range transmission plan every three years, Lisonbee said, to identify reliability deficiencies over a 20‑year horizon and to start public discussion of possible fixes. The 2024 plan models two scenarios: a high‑load pathway aligned with state electrification goals and a lower‑adoption pathway. In VELCO’s high scenario the plan projects Vermont peak demand could reach about 1,600 megawatts by 2043.

Lisonbee said planners deliberately did not assume in the 2024 model that electric vehicle charging and other loads will be widely managed (so‑called flexible load management) because the available data are not yet robust enough to guarantee how much load can be shifted. “If we don't have the data to say that it can happen, we need to remove it from our planning assumption so that we can find a baseline,” she said. VELCO staff said that in an earlier plan (2021) they had assumed managed EV charging and that the 2021 plan showed no reliability deficiencies; the 2024 plan took a more conservative…