One of the biggest obstacles to expanding clean energy in the United States is the lack of transmission lines. Construction of new power lines can take more than a decade, allowing for delays and local opposition. But there may be a faster and cheaper solution. According to two reports released on Tuesday.
Replacing existing power lines with cables made from cutting-edge materials could nearly double the capacity of the power grid in many parts of the country, making room for more wind and solar power. There is.
This technology, known as “advanced reconduction,” is widely used in other countries. However, researchers found that many U.S. utilities have been slow to adopt the technology due to unfamiliarity with it and regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles.
“We were quite surprised by how large the capacity increase could be with reconductorization,” said Amol Phadke, a senior scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to one of the reports released Tuesday. he said. Berkeley researchers teamed up with the consulting firm GridLab to investigate what would happen if advanced reconduction were widely adopted.
“This is not the only thing we have to do to upgrade the power grid, but it can be a major part of the solution,” Dr Phadke said.
Most power lines today consist of a steel core surrounded by aluminum strands, a design that has been around for a century. In the 2000s, several companies developed cables that used smaller, lighter cores such as carbon fiber and could hold more aluminum. These advanced cables can carry up to twice the current compared to older models.
Replacing old lines can be done relatively quickly. In 2011, Texas power company AEP urgently needed to bring more power to the lower Rio Grande Valley to accommodate a rapidly growing population. Obtaining land and permits and building towers for new power lines would have taken too long. Instead, AEP Replaced 240 miles of electrical wire on existing tracks The use of advanced conductors increased the line’s carrying capacity by 40% in less than three years.
In many places, upgrading power lines with advanced conductors could nearly double the capacity of existing power transmission corridors for less than half the cost of building new lines, researchers say. It was revealed by et al. If power companies begin deploying advanced conductors nationwide, they could replace thousands of miles of wire and add four times the current pace of transmission capacity by 2035.
That would unlock even more solar and wind power from the thousands of projects that have been proposed but can’t move forward because local power grids are too clogged to handle them.
Installing advanced power lines is a promising idea, but questions remain, including how much additional wind and solar power can be built near existing power lines, said Southern California, one of the nation’s largest producers.・Shinjini Menon, Edison’s vice president of asset management and wildfire safety, said: utility. Utilities will likely still need to build many new transmission lines to reach more remote, windy, sunny areas, she says.
“We agree that advanced conductors would be very useful,” Menon said. Mr. Menon’s company has already undertaken several reconductor projects in California. “But how far can we go? The jury is still out.”
Experts largely agree that the underdeveloped power grid is the Achilles’ heel of the transition to clean energy. The Department of Energy estimates that the nation’s power grid may need to be expanded by more than two-thirds by 2035 to meet President Biden’s goal of powering the country with clean energy. ing.
However, building power lines is grueling work, with developers having to route new lines through multiple counties, obtain permits from various government agencies, and damage landscapes and ecosystems. It may take more than 10 years to resolve a lawsuit regarding damages to Last year, the United States added: 401 miles of high-voltage power linesThis number has been decreasing for 10 years.
The risks to climate change are high. In 2022, as part of the Anti-Inflation Act, Congress approved spending hundreds of billions of dollars on solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and other non-polluting technologies to fight global warming. But if the U.S. is unable to add new transmission capacity more quickly, roughly half of the law’s expected emissions reductions will be cut. it may not come trueThis was discovered by researchers from the Princeton-led REPEAT project.
Because of the difficulty of building new power grids, many energy experts and industry players have been looking for ways to extract more power from the existing grid. For that, “Grid reinforcement technology” Examples include sensors that allow power companies to send more power without overloading existing transmission lines, and advanced controls that allow carriers to reduce grid congestion. Studies have shown that these techniques can increase grid capacity by 10 to 30 percent at low cost.
Emilia Chojkiewicz, one of the authors of the Berkeley report, said countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands are widely deploying advanced conductors to better integrate wind and solar power.
“I talked to the transmission system planners over there, and they all said this was easy,” Chozikiewicz said. “Obtaining a new right-of-way for a route is often difficult, and rerouting is much faster.”
If reconduction is so effective, why aren’t more U.S. utilities doing it? That question is asked in a second report released Tuesday by the nonprofit Grid Lab and Energy Innovation. That was the focus of the book.
One problem is the fragmented nature of America’s electricity system. In reality, it is made up of three power grids operated by 3,200 different power companies and a complex patchwork of regional planners and regulators. This means that new technologies, which require careful research and worker retraining, may be adopted more slowly than in countries with a small number of transmission operators.
“Many utilities are risk averse,” said Dave Bryant, chief technology officer at CTC Global, a leading manufacturer of advanced conductors with projects in more than 60 countries.
Misaligned incentives also exist, the report found. Due to the way utilities are compensated, there is often a greater financial incentive to build new transmission lines than to upgrade existing equipment. Conversely, some regulators are wary of the high initial cost of advanced conductors, even if they pay for themselves in the long run. Many utilities also have little appetite to cooperate with each other on long-term transmission plans.
“The biggest barrier is that industry and regulators remain stuck in a short-term, reactive mindset,” said Casey Baker, senior program manager at GridLabs. “But now we are in an era where we need to grow our grid rapidly, and existing processes are not keeping up with that reality.”
That may be starting to change in some places. In Montana, Northwestern Energy recently replaced some aging power lines with advanced conductors to reduce the risk of wildfires. New power lines sag less in the heat and are less likely to come into contact with trees.Montana lawmakers are happy with the results. passed the bill It would give utilities an economic incentive to install advanced conductors.virginia bill utility is required To think about technology.
Many power companies are becoming wary of new technology as construction of new data centers, factories and electric vehicles begins to surge power demand for the first time in 20 years, creating bottlenecks in the power grid.
Pedro Pizarro, president and chief executive officer of California electric utility Edison International and president of the Edison Electric Association, said, There’s been a lot of interest.” , public utility organizations. “There’s a sense of urgency.”
