Biden Wants an All-Electric America. The Grid Has a Problem.
In this famous 1938 photo by Dorothea Lange, workers install power lines in the San Joaquin Valley of California under a rural electrification program launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Library of Congress)
President Biden expects to reduce U.S. emissions 50% below 2005 levels by 2030, and to arrive at net zero emissions from all the nation's power plants by 2035. "The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast", says naysaying scientist Vaclav Smil:
"People don’t appreciate the magnitude of the task and are setting up artificial deadlines which are unrealistic. People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem."
Writing in The New Yorker, environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert underscores Smil's bracing caveat, telling us that the U.S. electrical
grid…
”…comprises more than eleven thousand generating plants, more than six hundred thousand miles of high-voltage transmission lines, and some six million miles of distribution lines."
Our grid has been called “the largest machine ever built by man.” The U.S. electrical system is becoming less reliable. Fossil-fuel power plants are going out of service faster than renewable sources are being installed, which could lead to increasing brownouts and blackouts. In 2000, there were fewer than 50 major outages. In 2020, the number approached 200.
Much of its transmission infrastructure is in need of upgrade, having been built just after World War II and even before, and weighing on that, it is now to undergo a total transformation to accommodate Biden's flank speed conversion to wind and solar.
A FAR PIECE
Power plants have typically been built close to existing transmission lines because such connections are costly to build. But with wind and solar, a power project doesn't get to pick a convenient location. That means thousands of miles of new transmission lines are needed criss-crossing the country to bring power generated where the wind blows the most and the sun shines the brightest to the population centers where the power is needed.
In his infrastructure bill, Biden appropriated $73 billion for thousands of miles of new power lines. Cost estimates range much higher. A 2021 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers says that, with 70% of lines "well into the second half of their expected 50-year lifespans", more like $200 billion is needed for existing lines. The 2035 goal of decarbonizing demands over a million miles of new transmission lines, in one estimate. The cost of stringing all these lines will, in another estimate, come to more than $2 trillion.
JUICE LOCAVORES
Power utilities, the renewable energy industry, and environmental groups split on which is the better option, transmission at a distance or decentralization of power sources. Keeping it local — rooftop solar and microgrids for towns and neighborhoods to generate their own electricity — would at least reduce the need for transmission lines and would be on stream far more quickly. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the administration supports that but decentralized approaches would not be sufficient to achieve the president’s 2035 goal.
So the administration barged ahead with the Inflation Reduction Act with climate provisions that provide for less than $30 billion of what we understand to be largely subsidies for "home energy efficiency upgrades" and "home energy supply improvements". Bernadette Del Chiaro, director of an organization that lobbies for the rooftop solar industry, said to The New York Times,
"Clearly, the utilities are stuck in the 20th century; they want to build the transcontinental railroad of the electric grid.”
NIMBY
Transmission towers and power lines are not welcome by those who live along their route. People don't want the disruption and the defacement of their woods and farmlands for delivery of power that will benefit some other state. Announce a project and environmental activists are likely to raise a ruckus. Kentucky and Virginia have seen plans for 3,000 acres of solar panels delayed. A 720-mile link from Oklahoma wind farms to Tennessee was cancelled when Arkansas refused transit. A line from Kansas to Indiana has been held up for a decade owing to Missouri's objections. A single Colorado family has stalled for years a transmission project from Wyoming to supply cities on the West Coast.
When passage of a transmission line that was to bring hydropower from Quebec to the Boston area was thwarted by New Hampshire, lying in its path, it was remapped to pass through Maine, whereupon voters struck down that maneuver in a referendum even while work was already under way. Much of the referendum's backing was provided by NextEra, a nuclear plant operator in Maine that saw hydro as competition.
The Biden administration recognizes such objections, say officials, and hopes stringing power lines along highways, railroad tracks, and other existing rights of way could avoid conflicts.
WHAT GRID?
"How will you decarbonize and run the country by wind and solar without a national grid? And what will it take to build a national grid in a NIMBY society like the U.S.?"
That's Professor Smil again. The 80-year-old… continue reading
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