Transmission week: why we need more big power lines

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Hello, Volties, and welcome to Transmission Week here at Volts!
It’s been delayed almost as many times as Infrastructure Week,
but it’s finally here. All week, we’re going to be digging into
the US energy transmission system.


For those of you new to the subject, “transmission system” refers
to the big, high-voltage power lines that carry electricity over
long distances, usually perched along tall metal towers. To use a
road analogy, transmission lines are like the interstate system,
whereas lower-voltage “distribution systems” are like the nests
of highways and streets that serve local populations.


I’ve always been fascinated by distribution systems, but I’ve
never really taken a deep dive into the transmission side of
things. Until now!


And now that I have, I understand better than ever why I put it
off for so long.


It’s complicated, y’all. There are lots and lots of acronyms,
agencies, and obscure policies involved. It’s not the sexiest
stuff.


But it’s important. Transmission is one of the key tools to help
decarbonize the country and also one of the biggest, most
dangerous bottlenecks standing in the way. We (probably) can’t
decarbonize at the scale and speed we need without more of it,
but laws, rules, and systems designed for a different century and
a different electricity system are slowing it to a snail’s pace.


The entire transmission process badly needs attention and reform.
And there are signs it may finally be getting some. There’s
bipartisan political support for it, along with support from big
unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.


“I'm excited about transmission,” says Fatima Ahmad, senior
counsel for the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. “I
see jobs benefits, I see bipartisan interest, I see more and more
climate policy advocates taking the time to get educated about
these issues — all those things make me excited. This is just
such a clear next step.”


So here’s what we’re going to do. Today, I’m going to try to
convince you that transmission matters: we need more of it, we’re
not building it, our decarbonization goals are at risk, but we’re
at a moment when real reform is possible.


In the next post, we’ll get into the weeds. Getting a
transmission line built requires planning, financing, permitting,
and siting, and right now every single step of that process is
dysfunctional and constipated. In each case, we’ll look at what
Biden can do (through the agencies) and what Congress can do to
expedite the process. Expect acronyms.


In the post after that, we’ll look at a related issue: not how to
build new transmission lines, but how to improve the existing
transmission system with “grid-enhancing technologies.” (Get
excited about topology optimization algorithms!)


And finally, we’ll review what we’ve learned and contemplate the
political landscape ahead.


It’s gonna be so much fun!


Why we need more transmission


I wrote about the need for more transmission here and here for
Vox, if you want to really dig in, but here’s a quick review of
the top reasons.


We need more transmission to decarbonize


A group of researchers at Princeton recently did some
comprehensive modeling of US decarbonization scenarios. Of the
scenarios that achieved net-zero, the one with the least new
transmission — the RE- scenario, which includes lots of nuclear
power and natural gas with carbon capture and sequestration —
doubles US transmission capacity by 2050. In the more
renewables-heavy scenario, E+, transmission triples.


Modeling from Dr. Christopher Clack at Vibrant Clean Energy has
produced similar results, as have many other studies.


If the US wants to decarbonize at all, it’s going to have to
build the sh*t out of some new transmission.


We need a national energy grid anyway


Despite my road analogy above, the US transmission system is
different from its interstate system in one important way: we
have a true national interstate network. No matter where you are
in the system, you can drive to anywhere else in the system.


The US does not have a true national energy network. Instead,
functionally speaking, it has three transmission grids: the
Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and ERCOT
(a Texas grid, basically). Though there are a few small ties
between them, very little energy is exchanged. They mostly
operate in isolation.


(As you can see from all the labels below, the Eastern
Interconnection is divided up among several functional
transmission regions, but they are all connected to a common
physical grid.)


This is goofy. Linking them together with high-voltage direct
current (HVDC) lines — i.e., creating a true national energy
network — would allow them to share, exporting energy when they
have oversupply or importing it when supply is stretched. Early
morning solar in Arizona could go to New York at the peak of its
afternoon demand. Evening wind power in North Dakota could go to
California when everyone is turning on their big screen TVs.


Generally, with grids, the bigger and more interconnected they
are, the more efficient, reliable, and cost-effective they are.
To wit: a 2016 study by scientists at NOAA found that a national
HVDC network would save US consumers $47 billion annually. The
Interconnections Seam Study by the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory (NREL) — a study the Trump administration tried to
squash — found that every $1 invested in a national HVDC grid
would return $2.50 in economic, environmental, and social
benefits.


A national grid (with the appropriate cybersecurity and
resilience measures) would allow the US to make the best possible
use of its domestic clean-energy resources. It’s a no-brainer.


(By the by, China is in the midst of plowing $26 billion into a
national network of ultra-high voltage lines — UHVDC — to carry
renewable energy across the country.)


We need to connect remote renewables to population centers


The areas in the US where sunlight and wind are most intense (the
desert Southwest and the Midwest corridor, respectively) are
distant from the metropolitan areas (mostly along the coasts)
where there is most demand.


To make use of that remote renewable energy, we need transmission
lines much longer than most that were built in the age of fossil
fuel electricity, when plants could be built close by. Those long
HVDC lines will require sophisticated new technologies and
unfamiliar planning processes. Right now, we’re stuck in a
chicken-and-egg problem: renewable energy developers are hesitant
to build, not knowing whether they’ll be forced to pay for
expensive new lines; transmission developers are hesitant to
build, not knowing whether there will be generators to fill their
lines.


Someone (spoiler: the federal government) needs to come in and
break up the logjam to get things moving. There’s a huge pool of
clean, domestic American energy waiting to be tapped.


We need to prepare for clean electrification


Among today’s US energy wonks, it is now fairly widely agreed
that the fastest, cheapest, and possibly only route to
large-scale, near-term decarbonization is through clean
electrification. That means, first and foremost, transitioning to
a net-zero-carbon electricity grid. But it also means shifting
most transportation and heating/cooling off of liquid fossil
fuels and onto electricity.


Large-scale electrification will dramatically increase demand for
electricity — close to 40% by 2050, by some estimates.


It will also change the location and timing of energy demand, in
ways that will change where and when the grid is stressed.


A plan to decarbonize the US must involve looking forward,
anticipating those changes, and planning the transmission system
around them.


We need to relieve grid congestion


Even transmission wires of modest length can help relieve
congestion in regional grids and make them more efficient and
cost-effective.


Currently, congestion is a major problem, and it’s creating a
nightmare for new renewable energy projects in some regions. A
recent report from Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG) found
that, “at the end of 2019, 734 gigawatts of proposed generation —
90 percent of which are new wind, solar, and storage projects —
were waiting in interconnection queues nationwide.” Not all that
proposed generation would be built, even in the best of
circumstances, but it’s still an enormous backlog of projects
waiting to connect.


Here’s a map of grid congestion in the territory covered by the
Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). The areas in
orange and red are already overloaded (as of 2018).


A recent analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council’s
Sustainable FERC Project — well-covered by Kari Lydersen for
Midwest Energy News — found that “245 clean energy projects that
had reached advanced stages of development were withdrawn between
January 2016 and July 2020,” mainly due to grid congestion and
the resulting high costs of grid upgrades. That’s an enormous
amount of clean energy — and work on the part of renewable energy
developers — down the drain.


The graph below shows the amount of different kinds of energy
waiting in interconnection queues from 2014 to 2019 — as you can
see, both solar and wind are spiking. We’ve got more and more
clean energy just waiting around to start sending electrons.


Unclogging those queues requires, among other things, building
more transmission.


Remember that study by the NOAA scientists? It also found that a
national energy grid would allow the integration of 523 gigawatts
of new wind and 371 gigawatts of new solar. (US total electrical
capacity is around 1,200 gigawatts, so those are not small
amounts.)


So: new transmission would help integrate renewable energy,
reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce electricity costs, and
relieve congestion. It’s national infrastructure that creates
jobs and repays upfront investment many times over. We can’t hit
our national decarbonization goals without it.


It is good. We should build more of it.


State and local resistance is constipating the national energy
grid


I’ll go into this in more detail in the next post, but the root
of the problem for transmission in the US is local resistance.


For natural gas, the federal government can step in, permit a
pipeline, and seize land via eminent domain. It does not have
that authority when it comes to transmission lines (except in
some special cases). In the US, transmission siting is controlled
by states. The process is a bureaucratic marathon subject to
parochial objections and ridden with veto points at every stage.


That’s why, even as the consensus around the need for new
national transmission has been strengthening for decades, the US
has continued … not building much. We have been under-investing
in transmission for decades. Check out how electricity demand
outran transmission expansion from 1988 to 2009:


Texas broke the mold by building a bunch of transmission to
connect renewables through its Competitive Renewable Energy Zones
(CREZ) program in the 2010s, but the rest of the country hasn’t
followed suit. Some shorter local lines are getting built, some
lines that are underwater (and thus free of local landowners),
but in terms of long-distance, high-voltage lines, there’s been
basically bupkis.


(In his book Superpower, journalist Russell Gold tells the story
of Houston entrepreneur Michael Skelly and his company Clean Line
Energy Partners, which had grand plans to build a national
network of HVDC transmission lines — plans that were largely
frustrated.)


And so, overall, the US transmission system is as janky and
outdated as the rest of its infrastructure.


There are some positive signs, though. Biden is choosing smart
people to lead the agencies that will have a hand in
transmission, there’s broad public and political appetite for
Green New Deal-style infrastructure spending, and advocates have
begun a coordinated push to get the issue some attention — see,
for example, the Macro Grid Initiative, a co-production of the
American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) and ACEG. In its
recent comprehensive report, the House Select Committee on the
Climate Crisis included a whole detailed section on “moving
toward a national Supergrid.”


The top recommendation in all the reports I’ve read is simply
that transmission be made a national priority. The president
needs to affirm via executive order — and preferably Congress by
legislation — that federal agencies will cooperate to develop and
implement a comprehensive plan for a national transmission grid.


That’s the big picture. On our next episode of Volts, we’ll dig
into the specifics of what Congress can do, and what Biden can do
without Congress, to get the process of building a national
energy grid unconstipated.


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