The Green Technocrat

A few months back I wrote an article about how large scale solar and wind farms were starting to cause real headaches for the people whose job it is to ensure our nation’s electrical grid runs smoothly.  In November the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) released a report saying that if we began putting tighter and tighter restrictions on powerplant emissions, and began taking steps to produce more and more of our nation’s power production from renewable resources that our nation’s electrical grid simply wasn’t going to be up to the task.

The problem is simple (at least on paper).  Many of America’s best renewable resource generating regions lie far, far way from the large scale distribution hubs (which are typically located near oil, nuclear, or coal fire power plants) that can then transport this electricity to nearby cities.  “Most of the potential for renewable resources tends to be in places where we don’t have robust existing transmission infrastructure,” says George Van Wiele, chief executive of ISO New England, who oversees electrical transmission in the six-state region.

Making a case for remaking the grid

Long before climate change spurred our nation (however gently) into reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, there was a case to be made for a major overhaul of our nation’s electrical grid.  Simply put, our nation does not have a national electrical grid.  The decrepit system we rely upon so heavily is controlled by more than 500 owners, and carries current from more than 10,000 power plants run by about 6,000 investor-owned utilities, public power systems and co-ops.  These high-voltage utility lines cover four regional grids in the United States (Texas has its own), and are linked by low-voltage connecting lines that do not provide the capacity to transport electricty from region to region, nor do they have the capacity to handle the additional burden from large scale solar or wind plants that would be intermittently pumping in large additional amounts of electricty.

So what do we do now?  Well we can start by making our nation’s electrical grid just that, a national electrical grid.  To quote Matthew L. Wald from the New York Times ” The nation’s electric system is virtually a feudal system among those 500 owners. Control of the power flow is also balkanized among dozens of jurisdictions, an artifact of the grid’s history; it grew together from many small systems and local regulators that to this day are not melded.”

Last year American Electric Power (AEP) teamed up with the U.S Department of Energy to rethink the distribution system.  Instead of building upon our current system the AEP/DOE plan calls for a new system to be superimposed upon the old system.  The new system would be basically a high-voltage long distance transport system that would have various on/off stations along the way pumping energy into pre-existing localized grids.  This new transportation “backbone” would operate at a higher voltage (765 kilovolts) than most of todays existing transportation lines (345 kilovolts).  This would reduce system losses from today’s 3 to 8 percent range to about 1 percent.  To further decrease losses long distance transport lines would use direct-current as opposed to alternating current (which is what virtually all houses and business operate on).  This direct current would then have to be converted into alternating-current before being pumped into local grids.

Unfortunately, the price tag isn’t cheap, about $60 billion according to the DOE.  Is Obama willing to shell out this kind of cash as part of his massive economic stimulus plan?  Probably not.  Despite the fact that this grid could potentially pay for itself in about 5-10 years, it would not provide a large number of new jobs, nor would it yield any immediate economic benefits to the country.  We have the technology, we have the resources, the only question is when, not if, it will become an issue of national importance.

Via: Scientific American