Despite cashing out of three major transmission investments that involved 12,600 miles of transmission assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars in Michigan; Alberta, Canada and California over the past year , a founding senior executive with Reston, VA-based Trans-Elect, Inc., said the WECC area is still ripe for new investment and his firm intends to be part of it, starting with the Wyoming-Colorado high-voltage line it is pursuing with Wyoming's State Infrastructure Authority. Giving up its 72 percent interest in the transco-inspired public-private joint venture upgrade of California's iconic Path 15 project early this month, Trans-Elect sold a small foothold in California's grid to Boston-based Atlantic Power Corp., a privately financed generation plant investment company taking its first plunge into independent transmission ownership. Nevertheless, the project continues with experienced operating partners Pacific Gas and Electric and the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA). Recent subtle changes and a relatively low profile may change this fall when Trans-Elect is expected to announce some shifts in its ownership and management team to place much more emphasis on aggressive development, according to Robert Mitchell, managing director and chief development officer, who noted that the only reason Trans-Elect has sold its interest in Path 15 and the two other transmission systems is to accommodate other individual investors who wanted to monetize their investments. "We're going to be back by this fall to being 100 percent a development company and being singularly focused in that area. We'll be able to be more aggressive as a result," said Mitchell, who was one of the founding senior executives of the company in 1999 with former PacifiCorp CEO Fred Buckman, now Trans-Elect board chairman. "We will be even better financed than we have been in the past, so it is a very positive development for us "I see the opportunity for independent transmission ownership bigger than before. The only reason we are selling these assets right now is that some of the investors in those projects wanted to monetize the assets, and this is a good time to do that, so that motivated them. That is really the only reason. It wasn't because these weren't good assets, because they were and are. They are terrific assets," Mitchell said. " Trans-Elect is looking at a number of potential new and existing transmission lines in WECC, but the only one they have gone public about is the proposed new transmission on the TOT 3 corridor between Wyoming's Powder River Basin and the Front Range in Colorado. The Wyoming Infrastructure Authority and WAPA are involved, as well. The line is viewed as a way to accommodate already expressed interest from coal and wind-generated power producers to send their electrons to the load centers in and around Denver. " Public-private approaches are a specialty of Trans-Elect, and are expected to be applied in the Wyoming-Colorado project, and the independent private sector company now has substantial financial backing from GFI Energy Ventures, which holds the bulk of Trans-Elect's equity stake. "We're going to be able to be more aggressive in the development area than ever before," said Mitchell, adding that the sale of two other assets, in addition to Path 15, frees up more capital. (Michigan Electric Transmission Co., or METC, and the western Canadian AltaLink in which Trans-Elect is a partner.) The Wyoming line is one in which Trans-Elect is "actively engaged," said Mitchell, but it is pursuing others, such as the Frontier Line from Wyoming to California and the TransWest line between Wyoming and Arizona, conceived by Arizona Public Service [see "TransWest Express Zeroes in on Routes and Partners," July 14, 2006]. Path 15 was a quick fix, relatively straightforward, although economically challenging, way to remove a major north-south bottleneck in California's increasingly taxed grid. The other projects around the West attracting organizations, such as Trans-Elect, are mammoth in scale and financing, but Mitchell seems undeterred. APS has made it clear that partners for its project ultimately are welcome, Mitchell noted, and the Western Governors' Association-backed Frontier Line project has widespread public-private interest, although its complexity and duplication with parts of other relatively smaller projects, such as TransWest, make it a target for skepticism. "[Arizona Public Service] has made it clear from the beginning there will be partners; they are seeking 3,000 MW capacity for the line and they have a need for about half of that capacity, so they, indeed, are looking to load-serving entities and independent transco's, to be partners as well," said Mitchell, noting that the TransWest line is "absolutely" on the Trans-Elect radar screen. "There is a lot of synergy and some overlap between the APS proposal and the Frontier Line," Mitchell said. "There have been conversations between the two entities about how to maximize the synergies, so I think ultimately, there will be some working together." Although an independent with private backing, Trans-Elect's pending sales and any new ventures will each require Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approvals, among others. The federal regulatory hurdles don't bother Mitchell, and the added incentive returns for viable transmission projects -- plus incentives in the 2005 federal Energy Policy Act (EPAct) -- give him added optimism. He intends to bring some new professionals onboard in September, so rather than shrinking, he sees independent power transmission as an expanding sector.