LEXINGTON — Officials fear Kentucky's already full electrical power grid could be overloaded if a host of planned power plants gets built.

        The transmission system is capable of carrying the electricity used by businesses and residents in the state, according to utility executives and state regulators.

        But add new power — that won't likely be used by Kentucky — to the heavy surges that are already transmitted though and the state could face a meltdown.

        “We're asking two-lane highways to carry interstate traffic,” Roy Palk, president and CEO of East Kentucky Power Cooperative, told the Lexington Herald-Leader. “Those transmission lines were designed to carry the local loads.”

        The burden of fixing Kentucky's power overload could fall on ratepayers, who would face dramatically higher electricity bills for decades to come. Gov. Paul Patton has ordered a group of policy makers and industry insiders to study the state's transmission woes, along with other effects 24 proposed power plants might have on Kentucky. A moratorium on further proposals that Mr. Patton signed in June expires Jan. 11.

        The Governor's Energy Policy Advisory Board is scheduled to meet Thursday to review a new report that may provide more details on the state's power grid.

        The greatest dilemma for Kentucky, though, might not be new power plants in the state. It's the huge amounts of power shipped from plants in Northern states to Southern customers, creating electrical traffic jams.

        “The Kentucky transmission system has experienced numerous overload and voltage prob lems” due to heavy north-to-south transfers, according to a report this spring from the North American Electric Reliability Council. The nongovernmental agency monitors the reliability of electricity transmission across the United States.

        So far, companies have announced plans to construct more than 125 power plants in Kentucky and seven surrounding states.

        And as energy deregulation sets in, merchant power plants are beginning to spring up around the country. Of the 24 new power plants proposed in Kentucky, 20 are merchant plants. Unlike a regulated utility, a merchant plant doesn't have any guaranteed customers. It sells what it produces wholesale to the highest bidder — and often its customer might be hundreds of miles away.

        The most difficult part of moving electricity over long distances might be the design and age of the power grid itself.

        Most of Kentucky's 6,100 miles of high-voltage lines are several decades old, and the interconnections between the state's system and surrounding states weren't designed to carry the amounts of electricity now being pushed through them.

        For example, Kentucky has the ability to safely transfer about 4,700 megawatts of power south into the Tennessee Valley Authority's power grid, but those shipments routinely reach 7,000 megawatts, said Paul Atchison, vice president of power delivery for East Kentucky Power Cooperative.

        “We really do have a '60s-style transmission system,” said Jack Conway, chairman of the Governor's Energy Policy Advisory Board.

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