One thing the article left out: not much power is lost in transmission when high voltage lines are used, less than 10%. I was concerned about how much power would be lost in transmission had to google to find that.
I recall being taught in 8th grade science that 20% of power is lost in transmission, which made me think that transmitting from the windy plains to the lower Midwest or Northeast would be monstrously inefficient. The current figure is about half of that. Furthermore, loss is proportional to the inverse square of voltage times distance, so you can lose more power on a dozen miles of low voltage line than 200 miles of high voltage line.
This is a basic fact which practical people should know, akin to how many miles a ton of rail freight can travel using a gallon of fuel.
Long-distance lines are normally high-voltage direct current. When they say "high voltage" they mean it. A recent Chinese line is at 1.1MV (1,100,000 volts), and hundreds of kilovolts is normal. The transmission losses at these voltages are tiny - something like 3.5% per 1000km at 500kV. New York to Los Angeles is only about 3000km, so you're talking about 10% or less for coast-to-coast (most practical uses would be shorter than that). And, unlike AC transmission, they do not require grid synchronisation, which means they can stabilise a multi-grid system like the US - HVDC links between the three US grids would have allowed power to transfer to Texas during the recent crisis without needing to go through the complex and expensive process of integrating the grids together.
Yes, a multi-hundred kilovolt DC cable is really dangerous. That's why you stick it on top of giant pylons and you need permits and preventive maintenance.
This is true. Which is why AC still dominates. It is more popular in Europe but that is more or less attributable to the various non-standardized electrical systems used in various countries. Long distance here is a relative thing. The only reason to build any of these very long transmission lines is precisely so wind and solar power can use them. Nobody else really needs them.
No. No NO. They are never direct current barring a few experimental prototypes. This is why Tesla beat Edison. Power losses in direct current transmission are tremendous. Which is why Edison's direct current transmission required local power houses.
As others have noted, you're mistaking a historical technological limit with a physics problem.
Physics: for a wire of resistance R (proportional to length) carrying current at voltage V, resistive losses are P=V^2/R. So if you double the voltage, you cut resistive losses by a factor of 4. Any given wire has to be design to carry enough current at a high enough voltage, you can't just pump it arbitrarily high, but the math is simple. This rule *does not* depend on whether you're carrying DC or AC. If I put 120V DC through the wires in your house instead of 120V AC, the losses wouldn't change. *But* transformers for stepping AC voltage up and down are easy to build with late 1800s technology, whereas doing the same for DC requires diodes and transistors, and those kinds of power electronics weren't available until around the 1970s. So Tesla won because Edison's plan was stupid, and Edison's plan was stupid because we didn't have the tech to implement a smart version of it.
That said, when we talk about the "voltage" of an AC line, in which voltage oscillates sinusoidally (well, sum of 3 sine waves, but that doesn't matter), we're actually talking about the "rms" (a kind of average) voltage. The peak instantaneous voltage in a 120V household AC line is 170V, and so every wire in your walls is capable of carrying 170V. But that means if it were carrying 170V DC instead of 120V AC, you'd cut losses in half. In general, for *any* wire capable of a given maximum voltage, you'll lose half as much power by operating at DC at that voltage, than you will by carrying AC at the maximum rms voltage (which is a factor of sqrt(2) lower).
TL, DR: Higher voltages lose less power. Maximum DC voltage in a wire is always sqrt(2) times higher than maximum AC voltage. We have power electronics and Edison didn't.
The reason DC was a bad idea in the 19th century is that converting DC from high voltage suitable for long distance transport to low voltages suitable for use in the home use requires complicated electronics that simply didn't exist in the 19th century. So Edison had to use low voltage since he couldn't easily convert voltages and so had to locate his power plants near his customers, which just wasn't economical.
In the 21st century we have more sophisticated ways of converting between voltages than they did in the 19th century. This is a bit expensive but not compared to the overall cost of a long distance transmission line and the other advantages make it worth it.
Edison was using low-voltage DC. High-voltage DC is completely unsuitable as a line to the domestic users, because you'd need lots of step-down transformers to get to the specific voltages needed by appliances (and it's somewhat more dangerous than AC at the same voltage).
Power losses are inversely proportional to the square of the voltage, so high-voltage DC for long-distance transmission lines that then feed into giant converters that feed the grid with AC is much more efficient. Skin effect causes all sorts of problems with AC transmission at over about 100kV.
What you want is a bunch of smallish AC grids (Texas is actually a reasonable size) with HVDC interconnectors so load can be easily transferred between the grids.
Large grids become increasingly complex to run because of AC synchronisation issues.
Europe has a lot of submarine HVDC lines that link the grids on the many large islands to the mainland (so there are lines from Spain to the Balearics, Sweden to Gotland, France to Corsica, Italy to Sardinia, etc); these are only relatively moderate power compared to the longer-distance transmission lines intended as grid interconnects and to transmit green electricity long distances, which are really a feature of the last decade or so There are a bunch of such lines in the approval / construction process in the US - for example, the Rock Island Clean Line, to carry wind energy from Iowa to Chicago (though the opposition says it will mostly carry coal energy)
Just to add to that Europe comment: if you look at a list, it looks like Europe has a lot of HVDC lines. Most of those are lower power lines to link islands to the grid which date back to the 1960s-1980s, not recent higher power lines to compensate for the intermittency of renewable electricity.
If you're comparing Europe to the US or China on the green interconnects on the grid, it's not miles ahead, but if you just count HVDC lines, then that earlier generation make it appear to be.
Meh, I had 3933, and wrote it down as 2933. Whoops.
OK, 13%. Still not much, especially as you're not going to actually run from coast to coast, as the coasts will be the consumers and the generation will be inland.
For those who are wondering, a ton of rail freight can move about 500 miles on a gallon of fuel. It's about 140 miles for trucks, and about 600 miles for shipping cargo.
Now look up the power losses attendant with stepping up the power generated by solar panels , about .5 volts, to long distance transmission voltage which is anywhere from 250,000 thousand volts to a million. Add those losses to your transmission losses.
Geothermal is also a great untapped source of lithium; major expansion of geothermal drilling could be a huge benefit to the domestic lithium production for batteries.
For context, NREL says that at the Salton Sea geothermal plants in CA, 24k metric tons of lithium pass through annually in the hot geothermal brines. That’s about 30% of global lithium production. Extracting it is profitable at LCE prices of $11/kg compared to the average 2019 price $12.70. It’s very sustainable because heat and energy to purify the lithium are available from the geothermal plant. What’s more this is a fairly under-researched field so efficiency can go up a lot. GM is excited about this and recently announced a deal to source a lot of their lithium for automotive batteries from CA geothermal projects.
Been trying to build the Grain Belt Express transmission line in Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois for more than 10 years now. Every time it looks like we are getting close some other a-hole steps in to mess with things. No eminent domain, the only property lost is the actual space where the pole is located for which the company will pay 110% of the value of that land.
There are lots of long-distance international electric lines in Europe, for mostly the same reasons, but also French nuclear power. Lots of other countries have lowered their carbon emissions per MWh by importing French nuclear power (as well as building their own renewables). There's a giant transmission line that runs through the Channel Tunnel to bring power from France to Great Britain as well as various lines within the continent.
If there's a big interregional power transmission system, then the option could open up for one state to just decide to support nuclear power in a big way and then export it right across the US.
That could even work across national borders. Ireland exports large amounts of wind power to the UK, not because there's more wind in Ireland but because they need the money and there are fewer NIMBY restrictions on turbine construction.
New nuclear has three daunting challenges: national permitting, site permitting, and up-front costs. We can and should push on all three, but it won’t help until the 2030s so we need to deploy wind geothermal and solar as we wait
I fully agree that we need more long-distance transmission lines, that permitting them is a mess, and that the problem needs to be fixed. I just hope no one reads this as fuel for the misguided debate over centralized (big wind/solar farms plus long-distance transmission) vs distributed generation (rooftop and community solar with local storage) of green energy. As David Roberts explains here, we are going to need a mix of both. https://www.volts.wtf/p/rooftop-solar-and-home-batteries
Well, the "throw all the sh*t" approach does have its adherents, but in this case, the argument is a little more subtle. The idea is that you optimize the whole system by having a moderate amount of local generation and storage that is just enough to take the sharp peaks out of the demand for long-distance transmission, and thereby reduces the need to overbuild the long-distance lines to handle those brief peaks.
So Roberts needs to stop saying that carbon capture is a gimmick to keep the fossil fuel industry on life support. It is, but we should fund the research anyway.
I am not sure if this would alter any implementation or policy issue, but as a nation, we should commit to shifting from the ugly and unreliable above-line power grid and shift 100% to underground electric power lines.
It would make American towns, cities, and scenic byways look far more attractive and modern. And it would also protect our power grid from the elements.
Not to mention it'd be the biggest "hard hat" job push in decades.
Can we combine the urgency of electrifying our power sources and grid with the smart elegance of burying it?
It's sounds like something that Ds would be willing to shovel money towards, but wouldn't this suffer from the same NIMBY dynamic we constantly run up against?
Perhaps! Would this work indeed involve tons of coordination and disruption to private property owners? I would love the more robust grid, just checking...
I don't have research interns so I have not done my homework as Sir Matt would, but I would expect some disturbance for sure, but it would likely be a mild one: mostly curbside and streetside burials in the burbs and in rural communities. In urban areas, they appear to already be buried...?
Most of my bury the power lines plan is focused on the non-high voltage long distance lines that Matt is referring to. Still, why is it an extremely bad idea?
I agree that we should invest in interregional electric lines (and change regulation to make it easier). But I don't think it's a necessity- we can also make great progress on clean energy with the system we have now.
First- the color gradient on that solar PV map is pretty deceptive (as colored maps often are). Look at the scale- it goes from 2 at the bottom (nowhere in the continental US, might be in northern Canada or Alaska), to 3.6 in the middle (most of the northeast) to a max of 6 in the southwest. Obviously 6 is better than 3.6- but 3.6 is still plenty! Remember that the energy from solar PV comes from radiation, not temperature- you can still get sunburned on a cold cloudy day in the north.
In practical terms (source: https://news.energysage.com/how-many-solar-panels-do-i-need/) that means a house in Massachusetts might need 25 panels compared to just 20 for the same house in California. Sure, 25 costs more than 20, but it's not a huge difference. If we're just talking raw energy production, it's almost certainly cheaper to overbuild solar panels in the northeast than to move the electricity long distance from other states. Solar panels are cheap these days- we should overbuild them wherever possible, instead of relying on fancy workarounds. The excess is also useful for things like [strike]mining bitcoin[/strike] intensive scientific computation, which can be run flexibly whenever energy is cheap.
That said, intermittency obviously remains a problem. A 100% solar system has to deal with both short term outages (night time) and longer term outages (winter storms). The massive growth of battery production due to electric cars has gotten us to the point where battery storage is actually viable on a grid scale (see for example, Gateway Energy Storage in California), but it's still mostly as an alternative to gas peaker plants. In other words, current battery plants are to deal with sudden spikes in demand, not to power a city all night or through a winter storm season.
I think that advances in battery tech plus long-distance power transfer like this article suggests will eventually get us to the point where a solar could handle 100% of our electricity needs. (wind helps a lot to reduce the storage/transfer needs, but it also has much more limited potential than solar). So yes, by all means, we should invest in long distance electric transfer! That said, it's not a critical issue. I'm worried that the tone of articles like this downplays the incredible potential of the renewable energy technology we've *already* developed. This is a "build, baby, build" situation!
Let's use solar power to handle, say, 80% of our electricity needs, and switch to EVs as much as possible, while continuing to use fossil fuels for emergencies and backup (and nuclear too, but in my opinion the costs and political headaches aren't worth building new plants right now). At that point, we've reduced our carbon emissions by 80%, which buys us time to think about how to get the last 20%. It also allows us work on technologies like Carbon Sequestration and Direct Air Capture, which have the potential to get us not only to 0, but to *negative* carbon emissions, which is what we really need to get a win on climate.
In other words: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Solar panels and lithium batteries have massively cut costs in the past decade (thanks, China!). It's time to make use of them on a much bigger scale.
100% solar doesn't work without more battery storage than exists on the entire planet today. Electricity demand is lower at night, but not that much lower. And mass battery storage will have to compete with batteries needed for every car in the country along with every tractor and airplane. Trying to build such a system could take 50 years or more. Or we could just build nuclear and have it done in less than 10.
We will have fusion power before we could build a 100% solar grid.
This is the sort of argument that needs numbers and specific facts, not just words and guesses, in order to make it meaningful.
First- A big part of my argument was that we don't *need* to shoot directly for 100% solar. It's ok to shoot for "just" 80% renewable energy, while continuing to use the fossil fuel infrastructure that we have to bridge the more difficult cases. Electricity usage is about 50% higher during the day compared to at night (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915, depends on region and time of year), so I'd agree it's not hugely lower, but it's meaningfully lower.
EV batteries don't compete with grid storage- they help it. The same factories for making EV batteries are also making home and utility batteries. Old car batteries can be reused by utilities. Or EV car owners could use it for emergency storage- which Ford specifically showed in ads for their new electric truck. In theory, we could develop a new standard where everyone charges up their EV during the day, then releases the energy into the grid at night, solving two problems (transportation and nighttime energy) at once.
Almost no one, anywhere, is building nuclear plants these days, and when they do it takes longer than 10 years just to build *one*. So that seems like hopium to me, to imagine rebuilding our entire electric supply with nuclear in just 10 years. Maybe in some alternate political reality, but that's not the one we have. We might actually develop working fusion plants before we start building fission again in any meaningful way.
I would love to hear how EV batteries would actually help grid storage. The biggest thing consumers don't like about electric cars is the lack of range and the time it takes to recharge them. Your proposal is to further complicate the problem by making it so that when you plug in your car, the utilities might drain it instead of letting you charge it. No sane person would allow their car to be used this way. Such vehicles could never reach a full charge by morning since most people would be leaving before solar panels are producing any power at all.
Utilities can't just take old batteries and hook them up. It would neither be safe nor economical. Utility scale storage will have to be built at scale for that purpose.
Quite a few nuclear plants are being built and the only impediment to building more are people who think like you and imagine we have alternatives that aren't realistic. Politically this is often an insurmountable challenge, but you can solve that yourself pretty easily.
This is quite ludicrous actually. Let's begin with the idea that simply building a continent spanning grid of high voltage transmission lines solves the problem of getting solar or wind power from where it can be efficiently generated to where it needs to be. That is not at all true. The problem of distributing power from hundreds of thousands of point sources that randomly come on line or drop off with the vagaries of the weather requires requires quite a bit more than just long distance transmission lines. Which is why the existing grids get saturated with usable wind or solar at around ten to fifteen percent of transmitted power. After which they become unstable. But the really ludicrous idea is that making this monumental investment that only wind and solar and geothermal require will somehow lower the cost of that power. That cannot possible be true unless that stupendous investment is free. It won't be.
Basically this whole idea comes down to putting all your eggs in one basket, a continent spanning grid, and it is a dangerous idea. Part of the danger can be alleviated with mass energy storage of whatever type. But that too is tremendously expensive. And these costs must also be attributed to what are called sustainable sources if that is what you use them for. Where this gets interesting is that if you do have mass power storage it works much more efficiently with conventional power sources and you need a lot less of it. It is especially well suited to nuclear power. None of this is cheap. All of it has to be paid for and none of it is going to magically lower your power bill.
"Let's begin with the idea that simply building a continent spanning grid of high voltage transmission lines solves the problem..."
Why should we begin with an idea that MY's article does not advocate?
Let me introduce you to a terrifically useful pair of words: "necessary" and "sufficient".
Yggles argues that improvements to the grid are *necessary* for electrifying our power system. He does *not* argue that they are *sufficient*. Get the difference? We need to improve the grid, and we need to do a bunch of other stuff too. But without stretching more wires, the other stuff will not be sufficient either.
I'm a little confused by this. Are you saying that the grid proposed is useless or that it's only part of the solution?
And I don't get the point about storage. One of the things in the piece is that renewable energy isn't conveniently located for that. What am I misunderstanding there?
Yeah. I’m not following Peter G’s argument either. The need for a new grid that can distribute power more efficiently has been cited over and over again in every energy needs document I’ve read. Even California which is as pretty self contained energy wise as a country cites needs for a more efficient statewide distribution system. Of course storage is part of it, but I think the need for a new grid is pretty much a datum from what I’ve read.
Yes and it is true. The people who cite this need are the wind and solar people. As any electrical engineer will confirm they do need long distance transmission. And a lot of other stuff too as I mentioned. What they really need is for somebody else to spend a gigantic amount of money and have nobody notice it on their power bill. You should know that rebuilding existing grids, as in California, is a completely distinct problem.
It is the smallest part of the solution. The more difficult part technically is dealing with tens of thousands of intermittent generators. All of this must be synchronized to the grid, stepped up in voltage to grid transmission specs and requires exquisitely fast switching as power comes on or drops offline. Now that is going to cost some serious money. And it will be vulnerable. The only workable mass energy storage we have is water. You use excess generating capacity to pump it up to a reservoir and recover it with conventional tech when it is needed. And that happens to be located where the people are. Just like thermal generating stations.
IMO you are underestimating greatly how much such efficient integration is already being done not only all over the country (especially CA) but all over the world. We know how to do this.
You make strong points that I wish were better understood by climate activists, but I nevertheless disagree with your ultimate point. We already have essentially a continental spanning power grid. Now it would never be cost effective for a power plant in California to provide power to NY, but that's not what's being proposed here. My power plant in Western Washington is regularly supplying power to California and other states in the western half of the US. Power is going back and forth across state lines all the time and the system is more efficient and resilient because of it.
Every power plant that gets built has to grapple with the problem of transmission capability. Historically, the cost of upgrading lines has been split between the power provider and balancing authorities or utilities. What is being proposed here is to put a lot more of that cost on the federal government which would make new projects more attractive to private companies. The cost will be high, but not astronomical and it will be more efficient to do several large projects then a thousand piecemeal ones paid for by private companies and then passed on to consumers.
I agree with you that there are limits to how much wind and solar a grid can handle, but more high voltage lines will benefit everyone, even existing fossil plants if they can avoid line curtailments and sell their power to further locations. It costs money but it won't break us.
On the topic of the uneven playing field, where the regulatory system is geared toward fossil fuels, there is a risk that there will be more stringent procurement requirements, like Buy American, imposed on clean energy receiving financial support, including tax credits, under the Democratic climate push. In an effort to ensure no enemies on the left, the climate advocates within the Democratic Party seem to have settled on a "whatever labor wants" approach that is risking stronger Buy American requirements than anything imposed on the oil and gas industry. This is going to drive up the costs of deployment and slow down what needs to be a rapid growth in clean energy. Surprised this isn't getting more attention.
I’m not particularly familiar with the existing permitting process for natural gas, but I do live near the proposed PennEast pipeline. That’s been in litigation for years, now, including finally going before the Supreme Court this term. Obviously this isn’t a typical case, and I don’t know how atypical it is, but the state’s ability to impede that project makes me worry that the “giving landowners a fairer shake” provisions in the Whitehouse-Quigley bill might still prove to slow the process down too much.
Ultimately, though, SCOTUS said that the pipeline has power to proceed with eminent domain. Which is bad if you don't like natural gas pipelines, but good if you're trying to pass a law that puts transmission lines on the same footing as natural gas.
Ultimately, eminent domain is legalized condemnation. So if an entity has eminent domain power (the issue in the PennEast case), the only real substantive objections the landowner can raise are that i) they did not receive sufficient due process (notice and opportunity to be heard), or ii) that the valuation was incorrect. I don't know enough about the specifics of the notice provisions here to comment directly, but in theory, a fairer notice process on the front end should reduce the odds of success for back end lawsuits that scuttle the project.
I suspect that the fear is not so much that landowners will be given a fair shake, but that they will be able to tie the project up in litigation.
That is, landowners often take things to court over the amount of compensation not because they want more compensation, but because they don't want the project to happen at all and they're just looking for anything they can sue about.
So the PennEast pipeline seems at least somewhat likely to get NIMBY'd to death. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing for this specific project, honestly I'm not sure. But it makes me worry that the enhanced landowner protections in this bill relative to that process might be too onerous for new projects to overcome, even as transmission lines for clean electricity have more merit than new natural gas pipelines.
If you think that the government should have the power to seize someone's back yard to build things (and pay them compensation for it), then that power should be an effective one, ie the landowner shouldn't be able to delay everything by many years by going to court.
This aside does raise one of my personal bugbears, which is that courts are incredibly slow, which means that someone who doesn't have the legal right to stop something can still delay it for many years, and that delay can be an effective block, as the counterparty can't afford to wait.
I suspect that a major investment in more courts and more judges, resulting in cases being resolved far more quickly, would have all sorts of benefits. You don't need laws that are designed to get things out of court (like anti-SLAPP laws) if court cases were quick and cheap.
Easier permitting is vital, but as David Roberts has laid out in great detail, a big part of national transmission is getting states to agree to share power, whether regionally or nationally.
You'll recall this came up last winter with the big Texas freeze, but it is a more general problem
One thing the article left out: not much power is lost in transmission when high voltage lines are used, less than 10%. I was concerned about how much power would be lost in transmission had to google to find that.
I recall being taught in 8th grade science that 20% of power is lost in transmission, which made me think that transmitting from the windy plains to the lower Midwest or Northeast would be monstrously inefficient. The current figure is about half of that. Furthermore, loss is proportional to the inverse square of voltage times distance, so you can lose more power on a dozen miles of low voltage line than 200 miles of high voltage line.
This is a basic fact which practical people should know, akin to how many miles a ton of rail freight can travel using a gallon of fuel.
Long-distance lines are normally high-voltage direct current. When they say "high voltage" they mean it. A recent Chinese line is at 1.1MV (1,100,000 volts), and hundreds of kilovolts is normal. The transmission losses at these voltages are tiny - something like 3.5% per 1000km at 500kV. New York to Los Angeles is only about 3000km, so you're talking about 10% or less for coast-to-coast (most practical uses would be shorter than that). And, unlike AC transmission, they do not require grid synchronisation, which means they can stabilise a multi-grid system like the US - HVDC links between the three US grids would have allowed power to transfer to Texas during the recent crisis without needing to go through the complex and expensive process of integrating the grids together.
Yes, a multi-hundred kilovolt DC cable is really dangerous. That's why you stick it on top of giant pylons and you need permits and preventive maintenance.
You can't just string this along telephone poles.
This is true. Which is why AC still dominates. It is more popular in Europe but that is more or less attributable to the various non-standardized electrical systems used in various countries. Long distance here is a relative thing. The only reason to build any of these very long transmission lines is precisely so wind and solar power can use them. Nobody else really needs them.
No. No NO. They are never direct current barring a few experimental prototypes. This is why Tesla beat Edison. Power losses in direct current transmission are tremendous. Which is why Edison's direct current transmission required local power houses.
As others have noted, you're mistaking a historical technological limit with a physics problem.
Physics: for a wire of resistance R (proportional to length) carrying current at voltage V, resistive losses are P=V^2/R. So if you double the voltage, you cut resistive losses by a factor of 4. Any given wire has to be design to carry enough current at a high enough voltage, you can't just pump it arbitrarily high, but the math is simple. This rule *does not* depend on whether you're carrying DC or AC. If I put 120V DC through the wires in your house instead of 120V AC, the losses wouldn't change. *But* transformers for stepping AC voltage up and down are easy to build with late 1800s technology, whereas doing the same for DC requires diodes and transistors, and those kinds of power electronics weren't available until around the 1970s. So Tesla won because Edison's plan was stupid, and Edison's plan was stupid because we didn't have the tech to implement a smart version of it.
That said, when we talk about the "voltage" of an AC line, in which voltage oscillates sinusoidally (well, sum of 3 sine waves, but that doesn't matter), we're actually talking about the "rms" (a kind of average) voltage. The peak instantaneous voltage in a 120V household AC line is 170V, and so every wire in your walls is capable of carrying 170V. But that means if it were carrying 170V DC instead of 120V AC, you'd cut losses in half. In general, for *any* wire capable of a given maximum voltage, you'll lose half as much power by operating at DC at that voltage, than you will by carrying AC at the maximum rms voltage (which is a factor of sqrt(2) lower).
TL, DR: Higher voltages lose less power. Maximum DC voltage in a wire is always sqrt(2) times higher than maximum AC voltage. We have power electronics and Edison didn't.
The reason DC was a bad idea in the 19th century is that converting DC from high voltage suitable for long distance transport to low voltages suitable for use in the home use requires complicated electronics that simply didn't exist in the 19th century. So Edison had to use low voltage since he couldn't easily convert voltages and so had to locate his power plants near his customers, which just wasn't economical.
In the 21st century we have more sophisticated ways of converting between voltages than they did in the 19th century. This is a bit expensive but not compared to the overall cost of a long distance transmission line and the other advantages make it worth it.
Edison was using low-voltage DC. High-voltage DC is completely unsuitable as a line to the domestic users, because you'd need lots of step-down transformers to get to the specific voltages needed by appliances (and it's somewhat more dangerous than AC at the same voltage).
Power losses are inversely proportional to the square of the voltage, so high-voltage DC for long-distance transmission lines that then feed into giant converters that feed the grid with AC is much more efficient. Skin effect causes all sorts of problems with AC transmission at over about 100kV.
AC is much more common in the US, but HVDC appears to be gaining purchase abroad.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
What you want is a bunch of smallish AC grids (Texas is actually a reasonable size) with HVDC interconnectors so load can be easily transferred between the grids.
Large grids become increasingly complex to run because of AC synchronisation issues.
Europe has a lot of submarine HVDC lines that link the grids on the many large islands to the mainland (so there are lines from Spain to the Balearics, Sweden to Gotland, France to Corsica, Italy to Sardinia, etc); these are only relatively moderate power compared to the longer-distance transmission lines intended as grid interconnects and to transmit green electricity long distances, which are really a feature of the last decade or so There are a bunch of such lines in the approval / construction process in the US - for example, the Rock Island Clean Line, to carry wind energy from Iowa to Chicago (though the opposition says it will mostly carry coal energy)
Just to add to that Europe comment: if you look at a list, it looks like Europe has a lot of HVDC lines. Most of those are lower power lines to link islands to the grid which date back to the 1960s-1980s, not recent higher power lines to compensate for the intermittency of renewable electricity.
If you're comparing Europe to the US or China on the green interconnects on the grid, it's not miles ahead, but if you just count HVDC lines, then that earlier generation make it appear to be.
air distance from la to nyc is 3944 kilometers and power lines would presumably snake through the mountains.
Meh, I had 3933, and wrote it down as 2933. Whoops.
OK, 13%. Still not much, especially as you're not going to actually run from coast to coast, as the coasts will be the consumers and the generation will be inland.
didn’t mean to quibble, but you seem like the kind of person who generally gets numbers right and wouldn’t want to be off 33%.
Thanks, useful correction.
For those who are wondering, a ton of rail freight can move about 500 miles on a gallon of fuel. It's about 140 miles for trucks, and about 600 miles for shipping cargo.
Now look up the power losses attendant with stepping up the power generated by solar panels , about .5 volts, to long distance transmission voltage which is anywhere from 250,000 thousand volts to a million. Add those losses to your transmission losses.
you have numbers on that?
Look up Levelized Cost of Power. It's all there.
Geothermal is also a great untapped source of lithium; major expansion of geothermal drilling could be a huge benefit to the domestic lithium production for batteries.
For context, NREL says that at the Salton Sea geothermal plants in CA, 24k metric tons of lithium pass through annually in the hot geothermal brines. That’s about 30% of global lithium production. Extracting it is profitable at LCE prices of $11/kg compared to the average 2019 price $12.70. It’s very sustainable because heat and energy to purify the lithium are available from the geothermal plant. What’s more this is a fairly under-researched field so efficiency can go up a lot. GM is excited about this and recently announced a deal to source a lot of their lithium for automotive batteries from CA geothermal projects.
NREL report https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79178.pdf
GE announcement https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/gm-shakes-up-lithium-industry-with-california-geothermal-project-2021-07-02/
sweet!
No, salty!
It's basic
This is so interesting. Thank you!
Been trying to build the Grain Belt Express transmission line in Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois for more than 10 years now. Every time it looks like we are getting close some other a-hole steps in to mess with things. No eminent domain, the only property lost is the actual space where the pole is located for which the company will pay 110% of the value of that land.
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article250533944.html
Typo:
"and population density (top right)"
Should be "bottom right".
TIL that the old adage about all maps being population density maps also applies to solar resources. When did Arizona get so crowded!
https://xkcd.com/1138/
There are lots of long-distance international electric lines in Europe, for mostly the same reasons, but also French nuclear power. Lots of other countries have lowered their carbon emissions per MWh by importing French nuclear power (as well as building their own renewables). There's a giant transmission line that runs through the Channel Tunnel to bring power from France to Great Britain as well as various lines within the continent.
If there's a big interregional power transmission system, then the option could open up for one state to just decide to support nuclear power in a big way and then export it right across the US.
That could even work across national borders. Ireland exports large amounts of wind power to the UK, not because there's more wind in Ireland but because they need the money and there are fewer NIMBY restrictions on turbine construction.
#nuclearpowerforhaiti
Now, that is a thought, though I'd have thought that the hurricane risk would be a bad idea on the Caribbean islands.
New nuclear has three daunting challenges: national permitting, site permitting, and up-front costs. We can and should push on all three, but it won’t help until the 2030s so we need to deploy wind geothermal and solar as we wait
I fully agree that we need more long-distance transmission lines, that permitting them is a mess, and that the problem needs to be fixed. I just hope no one reads this as fuel for the misguided debate over centralized (big wind/solar farms plus long-distance transmission) vs distributed generation (rooftop and community solar with local storage) of green energy. As David Roberts explains here, we are going to need a mix of both. https://www.volts.wtf/p/rooftop-solar-and-home-batteries
Yeah, I remember when he was at Vox, David Roberts said we need an "all of the above" approach, where we do everything possible as fast as possible.
After I read that, my attitude toward all climate change stuff was "yeah, just throw sh*t at the wall and hope it sticks"
Well, the "throw all the sh*t" approach does have its adherents, but in this case, the argument is a little more subtle. The idea is that you optimize the whole system by having a moderate amount of local generation and storage that is just enough to take the sharp peaks out of the demand for long-distance transmission, and thereby reduces the need to overbuild the long-distance lines to handle those brief peaks.
So Roberts needs to stop saying that carbon capture is a gimmick to keep the fossil fuel industry on life support. It is, but we should fund the research anyway.
BURY THE POWER LINES.
I am not sure if this would alter any implementation or policy issue, but as a nation, we should commit to shifting from the ugly and unreliable above-line power grid and shift 100% to underground electric power lines.
It would make American towns, cities, and scenic byways look far more attractive and modern. And it would also protect our power grid from the elements.
Not to mention it'd be the biggest "hard hat" job push in decades.
Can we combine the urgency of electrifying our power sources and grid with the smart elegance of burying it?
It's sounds like something that Ds would be willing to shovel money towards, but wouldn't this suffer from the same NIMBY dynamic we constantly run up against?
I would argue no to NIMBY as there is a WIFM (nicer place to live; perhaps slightly higher property values to boot) for every NIMBY!
Perhaps! Would this work indeed involve tons of coordination and disruption to private property owners? I would love the more robust grid, just checking...
I don't have research interns so I have not done my homework as Sir Matt would, but I would expect some disturbance for sure, but it would likely be a mild one: mostly curbside and streetside burials in the burbs and in rural communities. In urban areas, they appear to already be buried...?
Its an extremely bad idea to bury high voltage long distance lines that Matt is talking about
Most of my bury the power lines plan is focused on the non-high voltage long distance lines that Matt is referring to. Still, why is it an extremely bad idea?
I agree that we should invest in interregional electric lines (and change regulation to make it easier). But I don't think it's a necessity- we can also make great progress on clean energy with the system we have now.
First- the color gradient on that solar PV map is pretty deceptive (as colored maps often are). Look at the scale- it goes from 2 at the bottom (nowhere in the continental US, might be in northern Canada or Alaska), to 3.6 in the middle (most of the northeast) to a max of 6 in the southwest. Obviously 6 is better than 3.6- but 3.6 is still plenty! Remember that the energy from solar PV comes from radiation, not temperature- you can still get sunburned on a cold cloudy day in the north.
In practical terms (source: https://news.energysage.com/how-many-solar-panels-do-i-need/) that means a house in Massachusetts might need 25 panels compared to just 20 for the same house in California. Sure, 25 costs more than 20, but it's not a huge difference. If we're just talking raw energy production, it's almost certainly cheaper to overbuild solar panels in the northeast than to move the electricity long distance from other states. Solar panels are cheap these days- we should overbuild them wherever possible, instead of relying on fancy workarounds. The excess is also useful for things like [strike]mining bitcoin[/strike] intensive scientific computation, which can be run flexibly whenever energy is cheap.
That said, intermittency obviously remains a problem. A 100% solar system has to deal with both short term outages (night time) and longer term outages (winter storms). The massive growth of battery production due to electric cars has gotten us to the point where battery storage is actually viable on a grid scale (see for example, Gateway Energy Storage in California), but it's still mostly as an alternative to gas peaker plants. In other words, current battery plants are to deal with sudden spikes in demand, not to power a city all night or through a winter storm season.
I think that advances in battery tech plus long-distance power transfer like this article suggests will eventually get us to the point where a solar could handle 100% of our electricity needs. (wind helps a lot to reduce the storage/transfer needs, but it also has much more limited potential than solar). So yes, by all means, we should invest in long distance electric transfer! That said, it's not a critical issue. I'm worried that the tone of articles like this downplays the incredible potential of the renewable energy technology we've *already* developed. This is a "build, baby, build" situation!
Let's use solar power to handle, say, 80% of our electricity needs, and switch to EVs as much as possible, while continuing to use fossil fuels for emergencies and backup (and nuclear too, but in my opinion the costs and political headaches aren't worth building new plants right now). At that point, we've reduced our carbon emissions by 80%, which buys us time to think about how to get the last 20%. It also allows us work on technologies like Carbon Sequestration and Direct Air Capture, which have the potential to get us not only to 0, but to *negative* carbon emissions, which is what we really need to get a win on climate.
In other words: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Solar panels and lithium batteries have massively cut costs in the past decade (thanks, China!). It's time to make use of them on a much bigger scale.
100% solar doesn't work without more battery storage than exists on the entire planet today. Electricity demand is lower at night, but not that much lower. And mass battery storage will have to compete with batteries needed for every car in the country along with every tractor and airplane. Trying to build such a system could take 50 years or more. Or we could just build nuclear and have it done in less than 10.
We will have fusion power before we could build a 100% solar grid.
This is the sort of argument that needs numbers and specific facts, not just words and guesses, in order to make it meaningful.
First- A big part of my argument was that we don't *need* to shoot directly for 100% solar. It's ok to shoot for "just" 80% renewable energy, while continuing to use the fossil fuel infrastructure that we have to bridge the more difficult cases. Electricity usage is about 50% higher during the day compared to at night (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915, depends on region and time of year), so I'd agree it's not hugely lower, but it's meaningfully lower.
EV batteries don't compete with grid storage- they help it. The same factories for making EV batteries are also making home and utility batteries. Old car batteries can be reused by utilities. Or EV car owners could use it for emergency storage- which Ford specifically showed in ads for their new electric truck. In theory, we could develop a new standard where everyone charges up their EV during the day, then releases the energy into the grid at night, solving two problems (transportation and nighttime energy) at once.
Almost no one, anywhere, is building nuclear plants these days, and when they do it takes longer than 10 years just to build *one*. So that seems like hopium to me, to imagine rebuilding our entire electric supply with nuclear in just 10 years. Maybe in some alternate political reality, but that's not the one we have. We might actually develop working fusion plants before we start building fission again in any meaningful way.
I would love to hear how EV batteries would actually help grid storage. The biggest thing consumers don't like about electric cars is the lack of range and the time it takes to recharge them. Your proposal is to further complicate the problem by making it so that when you plug in your car, the utilities might drain it instead of letting you charge it. No sane person would allow their car to be used this way. Such vehicles could never reach a full charge by morning since most people would be leaving before solar panels are producing any power at all.
Utilities can't just take old batteries and hook them up. It would neither be safe nor economical. Utility scale storage will have to be built at scale for that purpose.
Quite a few nuclear plants are being built and the only impediment to building more are people who think like you and imagine we have alternatives that aren't realistic. Politically this is often an insurmountable challenge, but you can solve that yourself pretty easily.
Hmm...someone been reading ex-colleague Dave Roberts, I presume? (Another great blog to read, if anyone is interested)
This is quite ludicrous actually. Let's begin with the idea that simply building a continent spanning grid of high voltage transmission lines solves the problem of getting solar or wind power from where it can be efficiently generated to where it needs to be. That is not at all true. The problem of distributing power from hundreds of thousands of point sources that randomly come on line or drop off with the vagaries of the weather requires requires quite a bit more than just long distance transmission lines. Which is why the existing grids get saturated with usable wind or solar at around ten to fifteen percent of transmitted power. After which they become unstable. But the really ludicrous idea is that making this monumental investment that only wind and solar and geothermal require will somehow lower the cost of that power. That cannot possible be true unless that stupendous investment is free. It won't be.
Basically this whole idea comes down to putting all your eggs in one basket, a continent spanning grid, and it is a dangerous idea. Part of the danger can be alleviated with mass energy storage of whatever type. But that too is tremendously expensive. And these costs must also be attributed to what are called sustainable sources if that is what you use them for. Where this gets interesting is that if you do have mass power storage it works much more efficiently with conventional power sources and you need a lot less of it. It is especially well suited to nuclear power. None of this is cheap. All of it has to be paid for and none of it is going to magically lower your power bill.
"Let's begin with the idea that simply building a continent spanning grid of high voltage transmission lines solves the problem..."
Why should we begin with an idea that MY's article does not advocate?
Let me introduce you to a terrifically useful pair of words: "necessary" and "sufficient".
Yggles argues that improvements to the grid are *necessary* for electrifying our power system. He does *not* argue that they are *sufficient*. Get the difference? We need to improve the grid, and we need to do a bunch of other stuff too. But without stretching more wires, the other stuff will not be sufficient either.
I'm a little confused by this. Are you saying that the grid proposed is useless or that it's only part of the solution?
And I don't get the point about storage. One of the things in the piece is that renewable energy isn't conveniently located for that. What am I misunderstanding there?
Yeah. I’m not following Peter G’s argument either. The need for a new grid that can distribute power more efficiently has been cited over and over again in every energy needs document I’ve read. Even California which is as pretty self contained energy wise as a country cites needs for a more efficient statewide distribution system. Of course storage is part of it, but I think the need for a new grid is pretty much a datum from what I’ve read.
Yes and it is true. The people who cite this need are the wind and solar people. As any electrical engineer will confirm they do need long distance transmission. And a lot of other stuff too as I mentioned. What they really need is for somebody else to spend a gigantic amount of money and have nobody notice it on their power bill. You should know that rebuilding existing grids, as in California, is a completely distinct problem.
It is the smallest part of the solution. The more difficult part technically is dealing with tens of thousands of intermittent generators. All of this must be synchronized to the grid, stepped up in voltage to grid transmission specs and requires exquisitely fast switching as power comes on or drops offline. Now that is going to cost some serious money. And it will be vulnerable. The only workable mass energy storage we have is water. You use excess generating capacity to pump it up to a reservoir and recover it with conventional tech when it is needed. And that happens to be located where the people are. Just like thermal generating stations.
IMO you are underestimating greatly how much such efficient integration is already being done not only all over the country (especially CA) but all over the world. We know how to do this.
California integrates 20GW of solar, 4GW of wind, and various long-distance imports at GE scale every day. Oh, and low-GW of battery storage
You make strong points that I wish were better understood by climate activists, but I nevertheless disagree with your ultimate point. We already have essentially a continental spanning power grid. Now it would never be cost effective for a power plant in California to provide power to NY, but that's not what's being proposed here. My power plant in Western Washington is regularly supplying power to California and other states in the western half of the US. Power is going back and forth across state lines all the time and the system is more efficient and resilient because of it.
Every power plant that gets built has to grapple with the problem of transmission capability. Historically, the cost of upgrading lines has been split between the power provider and balancing authorities or utilities. What is being proposed here is to put a lot more of that cost on the federal government which would make new projects more attractive to private companies. The cost will be high, but not astronomical and it will be more efficient to do several large projects then a thousand piecemeal ones paid for by private companies and then passed on to consumers.
I agree with you that there are limits to how much wind and solar a grid can handle, but more high voltage lines will benefit everyone, even existing fossil plants if they can avoid line curtailments and sell their power to further locations. It costs money but it won't break us.
On the topic of the uneven playing field, where the regulatory system is geared toward fossil fuels, there is a risk that there will be more stringent procurement requirements, like Buy American, imposed on clean energy receiving financial support, including tax credits, under the Democratic climate push. In an effort to ensure no enemies on the left, the climate advocates within the Democratic Party seem to have settled on a "whatever labor wants" approach that is risking stronger Buy American requirements than anything imposed on the oil and gas industry. This is going to drive up the costs of deployment and slow down what needs to be a rapid growth in clean energy. Surprised this isn't getting more attention.
It’s getting a lot of attention! And while there is tension here, tension can be productive: https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2021-06-10/why-a-california-oil-workers-union-is-getting-behind-clean-energy-boiling-point
I’m not particularly familiar with the existing permitting process for natural gas, but I do live near the proposed PennEast pipeline. That’s been in litigation for years, now, including finally going before the Supreme Court this term. Obviously this isn’t a typical case, and I don’t know how atypical it is, but the state’s ability to impede that project makes me worry that the “giving landowners a fairer shake” provisions in the Whitehouse-Quigley bill might still prove to slow the process down too much.
Ultimately, though, SCOTUS said that the pipeline has power to proceed with eminent domain. Which is bad if you don't like natural gas pipelines, but good if you're trying to pass a law that puts transmission lines on the same footing as natural gas.
Ultimately, eminent domain is legalized condemnation. So if an entity has eminent domain power (the issue in the PennEast case), the only real substantive objections the landowner can raise are that i) they did not receive sufficient due process (notice and opportunity to be heard), or ii) that the valuation was incorrect. I don't know enough about the specifics of the notice provisions here to comment directly, but in theory, a fairer notice process on the front end should reduce the odds of success for back end lawsuits that scuttle the project.
And what do you think are the implications of not giving landowners a fair shake?
I suspect that the fear is not so much that landowners will be given a fair shake, but that they will be able to tie the project up in litigation.
That is, landowners often take things to court over the amount of compensation not because they want more compensation, but because they don't want the project to happen at all and they're just looking for anything they can sue about.
Perhaps, but I would not want to jeopardize a constitutional right in order to make infrastructure project a bit more efficient.
So the PennEast pipeline seems at least somewhat likely to get NIMBY'd to death. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing for this specific project, honestly I'm not sure. But it makes me worry that the enhanced landowner protections in this bill relative to that process might be too onerous for new projects to overcome, even as transmission lines for clean electricity have more merit than new natural gas pipelines.
It could only get “NIMBY’d to death” by people whose actual back yards were affected.
If you think that the government should have the power to seize someone's back yard to build things (and pay them compensation for it), then that power should be an effective one, ie the landowner shouldn't be able to delay everything by many years by going to court.
This aside does raise one of my personal bugbears, which is that courts are incredibly slow, which means that someone who doesn't have the legal right to stop something can still delay it for many years, and that delay can be an effective block, as the counterparty can't afford to wait.
I suspect that a major investment in more courts and more judges, resulting in cases being resolved far more quickly, would have all sorts of benefits. You don't need laws that are designed to get things out of court (like anti-SLAPP laws) if court cases were quick and cheap.
“…courts are incredibly slow…”
Congress can address that.
"...and population density (top right)."
Should be *bottom* right.
Power this, DC that -- this is just all about Statehood for the District, right?
No Alternation without Oscillation!
Easier permitting is vital, but as David Roberts has laid out in great detail, a big part of national transmission is getting states to agree to share power, whether regionally or nationally.
You'll recall this came up last winter with the big Texas freeze, but it is a more general problem
For an entertaining read about this issue, I suggest Superpower by Russell Gold https://www.russellgold.net/superpower