Matt, this is great stuff. Let me pour some water on it. Afterward, you may still be right, but for the wrong reasons.
There is a difference between getting approval for electrical right-of-way and underground pipeline right-of-way (and electrical right-of-way, and etc.). But the difference isn't the problem.
It sounds like a great idea to bring electricity from far away to "balance supply and demand", though I'm skeptical that those promoting this actually believe in supply and demand.
If you could reach across the world with power lines to get renewable wind and solar energy from different time zones, what a wonderful world it would be. But that isn't the real world, because transmission lines involve loss. They aren't superconductors, and so you can't go too far for power before the loss in transmission becomes significant.
A second problem is that these systems can carry "bad" power. So if you build a big transmission system, there may be coal, natural gas, and nuclear (gasp) generators along the line. The construction of the transmission line is a subsidy for all generators.
Coming back to the beginning, the SITE Act may be a good start to figuring out some of the problems of electricity transmission. But if it only serves to confiscate property, and then extend power lines to places with fewer environmental restrictions, what is the point?
Right now, coal-fired electricity is illegal in California. But the inter-tie ensures that we get our share of coal and big hydro, and even power generated in Mexico.
In other words, instead of fixing the "big" problem, focus on the small ones.
I can’t help but think of these issues as sine and cosine waves. I think this post helps clarify that for me. We’re taking a while to adjust to what needs to be. A quarter step behind. One of the things that will happen as a result is that a lot of people will suffer. That’s human life. It doesn’t make it less tragic, because we can see the future and the pain that could be prevented, but we don’t have the human mechanisms to catch up more quickly.
Like I don’t buy into the uninhabitable earth thesis. We will find a way for earth to be inhabitable to us. But it could be a much more ethical and beautiful earth if we had the ability to integrate foresight into social decisions.
I agree but I think the uninhabitable earth thesis is more applicable in terms of who does the earth inhabit and allow human flourishing. Climate change really could cause some parts of the earth to be "uninhabitable" in that the people live there do not have access to sufficient resources to live there.
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.
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?
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?
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...?
Does anyone know how this relates to the fires in the west? My understanding is that many of the big California fires were caused by issues with power lines. The current way of dealing with it seems to be just shutting off power for areas with high fire risk, which is understandably not popular with people who live there. I think what PG&E is trying to move towards is small solar farms near the people who are impacted, so if they shut off the the risky power lines those people's service is minimally interrupted.
This seems like a very different model from what Matt's talking about above. Is it possible to increase the number of long range electric lines to the west without increasing fire risk?
Yes. To simplify things a bit, it's easier to clear all vegetation within one mile (I'm exaggerating here) of one single San-Fransisco-to-Salt-Lake-City line, than to do the same to the countless lines that bring electricity to different parts of California. In the first case, we are talking about a single long line that carries a huge amount of power. In the latter case, we are talking about many short lines spanning a huge low-density area that together may be longer than that single high-power line.
I'm all for speeding up the permit process and this should absolutely be done regardless. But I'm not sure that it would have the end result of actually getting the projects built. I thought that was mostly an ISO/RTO thing, at least for most areas? How does this interact with the existing ISOs/RTOs that conduct their own planning process? Why not expand them or make participation mandatory for all utilities?
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
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
"...and population density (top right)."
Should be *bottom* right.
Matt, this is great stuff. Let me pour some water on it. Afterward, you may still be right, but for the wrong reasons.
There is a difference between getting approval for electrical right-of-way and underground pipeline right-of-way (and electrical right-of-way, and etc.). But the difference isn't the problem.
It sounds like a great idea to bring electricity from far away to "balance supply and demand", though I'm skeptical that those promoting this actually believe in supply and demand.
If you could reach across the world with power lines to get renewable wind and solar energy from different time zones, what a wonderful world it would be. But that isn't the real world, because transmission lines involve loss. They aren't superconductors, and so you can't go too far for power before the loss in transmission becomes significant.
A second problem is that these systems can carry "bad" power. So if you build a big transmission system, there may be coal, natural gas, and nuclear (gasp) generators along the line. The construction of the transmission line is a subsidy for all generators.
Coming back to the beginning, the SITE Act may be a good start to figuring out some of the problems of electricity transmission. But if it only serves to confiscate property, and then extend power lines to places with fewer environmental restrictions, what is the point?
Right now, coal-fired electricity is illegal in California. But the inter-tie ensures that we get our share of coal and big hydro, and even power generated in Mexico.
In other words, instead of fixing the "big" problem, focus on the small ones.
This reminds me of all of those amazing videos of helicopters using air saws to trim trees along transmission lines. Example:
https://youtu.be/Sp0DqARvjwY
cutting burdensome regulation to allow for development. sounds good to me
Power this, DC that -- this is just all about Statehood for the District, right?
No Alternation without Oscillation!
I can’t help but think of these issues as sine and cosine waves. I think this post helps clarify that for me. We’re taking a while to adjust to what needs to be. A quarter step behind. One of the things that will happen as a result is that a lot of people will suffer. That’s human life. It doesn’t make it less tragic, because we can see the future and the pain that could be prevented, but we don’t have the human mechanisms to catch up more quickly.
Like I don’t buy into the uninhabitable earth thesis. We will find a way for earth to be inhabitable to us. But it could be a much more ethical and beautiful earth if we had the ability to integrate foresight into social decisions.
I agree but I think the uninhabitable earth thesis is more applicable in terms of who does the earth inhabit and allow human flourishing. Climate change really could cause some parts of the earth to be "uninhabitable" in that the people live there do not have access to sufficient resources to live there.
Couldn’t disagree there with you if I wanted to.
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)
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?
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?
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...?
Does anyone know how this relates to the fires in the west? My understanding is that many of the big California fires were caused by issues with power lines. The current way of dealing with it seems to be just shutting off power for areas with high fire risk, which is understandably not popular with people who live there. I think what PG&E is trying to move towards is small solar farms near the people who are impacted, so if they shut off the the risky power lines those people's service is minimally interrupted.
This seems like a very different model from what Matt's talking about above. Is it possible to increase the number of long range electric lines to the west without increasing fire risk?
Yes. To simplify things a bit, it's easier to clear all vegetation within one mile (I'm exaggerating here) of one single San-Fransisco-to-Salt-Lake-City line, than to do the same to the countless lines that bring electricity to different parts of California. In the first case, we are talking about a single long line that carries a huge amount of power. In the latter case, we are talking about many short lines spanning a huge low-density area that together may be longer than that single high-power line.
I'm all for speeding up the permit process and this should absolutely be done regardless. But I'm not sure that it would have the end result of actually getting the projects built. I thought that was mostly an ISO/RTO thing, at least for most areas? How does this interact with the existing ISOs/RTOs that conduct their own planning process? Why not expand them or make participation mandatory for all utilities?
I am guessing the biggest grass-roots threat in this space would be from people with conspiracy theories about power lines.
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
Or you could emphasize nuclear, which we will need for low carbon base load power anyway.
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.
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.
"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?
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
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.
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.