It's the grid, stupid.
New energy sources are useless if they can't get to users. The U.S. electrical grid is straining under demands for more clean power and increasingly extreme weather.
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Will Englund has a fine piece in the Washington Post this morning about the current state of the American electrical grid which is, to put it charitably, not great. I encourage you to read it but if you’re not up to the paywall, here’s the nut:
The nation’s already strained power grid is either at a turning point or poised to dash all those clean-power visions as it crumbles under the new stresses being placed on it…The American grid features stressed and often barely adequate equipment on the local level, and a region-by-region governing structure that in pursuit of market savings has become so complex that it obscures the full picture. But perhaps the central issue is chronic congestion on the transmission lines that bring power from where it’s made to where it’s wanted.
The “scientific” foundation of the article is a new study by Joseph Rand and collaborators at the Berkeley Lab. It turns out that becoming an energy supplier is not simply a matter of filling a desert with solar panels or windmills and opening it for business. Utilities and regional grid operators require projects seeking to connect to the grid to undergo a system impact study before they can be built. This process establishes what new transmission equipment or upgrades may be needed before a project can connect to the system and assigns the costs of that equipment. The lists of projects in this process are known as “interconnection queues”. According to the Berkeley Lab study:
As of the end of 2020, there were over 5,600 projects seeking grid interconnection across the U.S., representing over 755 GW of generation and an estimated ~204 GW of storage.
There is some good news in the report:
More than half (671 GW) of the estimated 1,100 GW of wind and solar capacity needed to approach a zero-carbon electricity target is already in development.
The really bad news is that the process is so slow and clunky that, according to the study:
Ultimately, much of this proposed capacity will not be built. Historically only ~24% of projects in the queues reached commercial operations, and less for wind (19%) and solar (16%). There are growing calls for queue reform to reduce cost, lead times, and speculation.
As part of his new infrastructure package, President Biden has promised to make “the largest investment in clean energy transmission in American history, modernizing our power grid to accelerate the build-out of zero-carbon, renewable energy.” He points to nearly 20 major transmission projects which are “ready to go.”
Thirty-seven participants in the Grid Infrastructure Advisory Council, created by GridWise Alliance earlier this year, and GridWise member organizations released a letter to Congressional leaders today urging them to fully fund at least $50 billion in federal spending to modernize the nation's electric power transmission and distribution systems. Said GridWise Alliance CEO Karen Wayland in a statement:
This is a critical time for our nation's power grid as a transition to new energy resources and increased reliability is demanded in all segments of the energy system. Grid modernization investments are essential to meet the goals of decarbonization, enhanced grid reliability and resilience, and affordability and equity.
The National Grid was established by The Electricity (Supply) Act of 1926 which led The Central Electricity Board to standardize the nation's electricity supply and establish the first synchronized AC grid, running at 132 kilovolts and 50 Hertz. This started operating as a national system, the National Grid, in 1938. Younger buildings than that are now collapsing in Miami.
As the power outages caused by freaky weather in Texas and the West remind us almost daily, we are extremely dependent upon electricity for our comfort and even existence. For those climate fans who are advocating the electrification of everything, this is surely a wake-up call. To paraphrase Captain Brody in Jaws: “We’re going to need a bigger, and better, grid.”
Dig Deeper
Queued Up: Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection As of the End of 2020 (Berkeley Lab)
The grid’s big looming problem: Getting power to where it’s needed (WaPo $)
Transmission Projects Ready to Go: Plugging into America’s Untapped Renewable Resources
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