Dept of Energy: https://www.energy.gov/articles/biden-harris-administration-...
National Transmission Planning Study: https://www.energy.gov/gdo/national-transmission-planning-st...
Transmission Facilitation Program: https://www.energy.gov/gdo/transmission-facilitation-program
"The projects will enable nearly 1,000 miles of new electric transmission development and 7,100 megawatts of new capacity in Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
They include the Aroostook Renewable Project in Maine, the Cimarron Link in Oklahoma, Southern Spirit connecting the Texas grid for the first time to southeastern U.S. power markets and Southline in New Mexico.
The Energy Department's National Transmission Planning study released Thursday was meant to be a long-term planning tool.
It found that a substantial expansion of the transmission system throughout the entire contiguous United States would deliver the biggest grid benefits. That could also save the national electric system between $270 billion to $490 billion through 2050."
> Southern Spirit connecting the Texas grid for the first time to southeastern U.S. power markets
That doesn't make sense about "first time". Southern Spirit is a new HVDC transmission line (which is awesome and what we need, more please!). There are already Eastern DC grid ties. This would be a good bit bigger (not sure existing ties are even GWs) but I don't understand first. Could someone shed more light on that for me?
> That doesn't make sense about "first time".
ERCOT (Texas grid) is famous for operating independently of neighboring grids to avoid federal regulation under FERC.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/congress-texas-should-rethi...
Failing to actually answer the question posed. And this wouldn't be an interconnection requiring that same kind of federal regulation so pretty irrelevant in the end too. And besides your point is already obvious from the above comments.
But I guess we'll just state random Texas facts now. Did you know the state flower is the Bluebonnet?
> Southern Spirit connecting the Texas grid for the first time to southeastern U.S. power markets
How will this work?
Wires.
It is a High-voltage DC transmission line and the infrastructure to connect to it. It runs HVDC, so there's no grid synchronization needed. The grid will still be "isolated", as there are already DC ties.
The interconnect out of Texas is a big deal. Texas has some of the most ideal land for solar and wind development, but the isolation of their grid has always been a problem.
I am hopeful that Texas becomes a big exporter of power to Mexico and perhaps even Florida using an undersea HVDC cable (as Texas can then power Florida with solar later into the evening). Texas solar and wind potential is simply incredible compared to local load demands.
https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/economic-data/energy/2...
https://seia.org/state-solar-policy/texas-solar/
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ercot-solar-generation-texa...
What is HVDC?
High Voltage Direct Current
High voltage direct current
Climate, regulatory, culture in Texas has it adding more solar and wind to the grid faster than any other state.
Florida is slightly ahead in terms of solar growth[1].
(The close followers suggest it can't be too much a matter of state-level regulatory environment: New York is at 23% growth to Texas's 25%.)
[1]: https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/a-decade-of-u...
I sure hope they’re forced to winterize their infrastructure if they’re providing power elsewhere. The last thing we need is the next cold spell causing rolling blackouts in other states. ERCOT seems unable to force any of the necessary upgrades.
Every time I head anti-electrification arguments around EVs, heat pumps, etc. it's usually a complaint about grid capacity. I always shake my head, because building more power lines is relatively easy on the scale of climate tech we need to kick all carbon emissions.
Let's brainstorm how to decarbonize fertilizer, or concrete.
That being said I am really glad to see more grid buildup! Especially as more renewables hit the grid. While locally intermittent, on the scale of the entire country they're fairly reliable and predictable.
> because building more power lines is relatively easy on the scale of climate tech we need to kick all carbon emissions.
Then why have the rates changed so much recently? More importantly if EVs are going to be the thing then home solar should be the way it get the majority of it's power. Why even build the lines? Isn't that just a subsidy?
> Let's brainstorm how to decarbonize fertilizer, or concrete.
I don't think you can. I think you should worry more about how concrete and fertilizer get _distributed_. This is essentially the same dynamic as the home solar problem above.
> on the scale of the entire country they're fairly reliable and predictable.
That's due to the way the grid itself is structure not how any one power source performs. No source of power is particularly reliable and unexpected maintenance intervals always occur. Point here being, if you try to switch a grid that's based on a mix of sources, over to a grid that isn't, you're probably going to end up with a surprising result or two during that misguided process.
> home solar should be the way it get the majority of it's power
This would be a bad idea as it costs 3x more than utility scale PV.
Aren't those cost factors based upon the type of load curves we currently see? Isn't there some reason to suspect that the efficiency rating will drop if we experience much greater offsets between time of generation and time of demand with the types of peaks that EV charging might bring? Wouldn't it be nice to have all this without having to engage with the daunting prospect that is the "smart grid?"
Even if you have rooftop solar, you still need a grid capable of supplying 100% the power because there are cloudy days and long sequences of cloudy days
Yes but EVs have batteries and people don't drive them to depletion every single day. I should have been more clear, I didn't mean the whole house, I meant the just the EVs specifically, for now. It would completely alleviate their impact on the grid as a consumer power source.
The 800,000 American homes that added solar to their roofs last year cover 100% of the electric used by every EV that's ever been sold in the US, and then some. They cover the electric usage by the EVs purchased last year by multiples. At this rate, you can do nothing and residential solar will already add much more capacity to the grid than EVs are taking from it.
> Let's brainstorm how to decarbonize fertilize
Haber-Bosch process with green hydrogen...
Indeed, it is an annoying argument that boils down to
"What will we do!? Current supply doesn't meet future demand!"
>That being said I am really glad to see more grid buildup! Especially as more renewables hit the grid. While locally intermittent, on the scale of the entire country they're fairly reliable and predictable.
Here's what's coming that makes people uncomfortable and they don't expect or understand:
Oversupply.
Seasonally, during good weather, during certain times of day, there's just going to be more electricity produced by solar/wind than anybody needs. You don't need to store it or use every bit of it, the grid is going to say no and because they're just solar panels, they are perfectly fine. Solar electricity is so cheap that it just doesn't matter. What customers will end up paying for is capacity instead of usage. Maybe there will be instantaneous pricing that will drop to zero-ish intermittently and consumers and industry will find ways of profiting from that.
But a whole lot of "problems" people complain about with solar are very much reduced if you just have "too many" solar panels. And they're cheap so who cares?
Like what would California do with way too much solar power? Boil water in the cheapest possible infrastructure for desalination, an enormous still. Very energy inefficient, but who cares if you just have the amps to spare?
There are a lot of industrial processes where energy efficiency is a problem and so simple processes are replaced by more efficient complex ones... but if you have free energy building out that simple infrastructure to only run when energy is cheap suddenly makes a lot more sense.
The "annoying" thing that the naysayers are pointing out is that we are not building enough power generation to support universally switching to electric vehicles. Unfortunately this "annoyance" happens to be true.
Also, California struggles to get new desalination plants through environmental approval. And most industrial processes need continuous power, not just power whenever the weather looks good.
Speaking to people in the industry I get a vibe that there’s permits and regulations that are severely bottlenecking new green energy deployments https://finance-commerce.com/2024/03/report-inefficient-perm...
Eh.
Solar installs are growing faster than electric car purchases. (roughly 30% YoY vs 20%)
People just make up statistics in their head supporting their position. Go look for the statistics for vehicle purchases and PV installs.
PV installs are outpacing anyone's previous estimation by a significant margin.
Isn’t something like Bitcoin mining a good candidate for an oversupply of energy?
Did you forget /s at the end of that?
Not particularly, the mining hardware depreciates fast, essentially being quite expensive to leave idle waiting for low energy prices, and the whole thing is kind of a gamble.
I wonder what the impact of the connection to Texas is going to be.
Are generators inside and outside of Texas already synchronized?
The project mentioned here is a HVDC transmission system. It does not require synchronization. There are already other DC grid ties.
This is exciting, but I can't find many details about resilience and hardening for CMEs.
Carrington [1] class events keep me up at night.