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."
How will this work?
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.
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?
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...
But I guess we'll just state random Texas facts now. Did you know the state flower is the Bluebonnet?
What I suspect this is referring to is connecting to the SERC[1] area. I can't find a good source, but I suspect the existing connections are to the MRO[2].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SERC_Reliability_Corporation 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Reliability_Organizati... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection#Ties
That means these new ties will be directly supplying the local grids of about half of the southeastern market which is a first all things considered.
Strictly speaking there are only three ties into any NERC interconnection. Two of them are ties into SPP. The other is a single AC tie into SERC but it was only briefly activated after Hurricane Ike and hasn't been activated since.
This new project has ties being built directly to both MISO and SOCO which means the texas grid will be connected directly to two of the four main operators of SERC (the southeastern grid/power market).
I'm having so much trouble finding details of the existing DC ties. I'd love to know more.
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2020/07/30/ERCOT_DC_Tie_Ope...
ERCOT also reports flows for the four existing DC ties: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/dctieflows
With that said the biggest tie is like half a GW, so my guess is that they used the term "power markets"" rather than "power grids" because the current links don't really function as a way to transfer bulk power between markets, even if the Texas grid is technically already connected outwards. Like in an emergency they can import a miniscule amount of power, but nobody's going to be seriously arb'ing power with the existing ties.
Home solar combined with storage that can enable house to be temporarily or perhaps even permanently off-grid increases resiliency of communities tremendously during emergency situations, which are more common than you think they are.
In addition, by encouraging policies that will help drop the price of home solar closer to grid solar prices and storage costs, you may eliminate a lot of the need to upgrade the grid in order to provide home charging for EVs.
I don't deny the grid needs massive amounts of investment in order to enable it to adapt to new pricing, realities of solar and wind. But I dislike that the home aspect of power generation is essentially ignored at the federal policy level from department of energy.
The huge advantage of local solar is intermittent power is useful even if it’s not that reliable. Being able to run a fridge/freezer 8 hours a day dramatically extends how long it takes food to spoil in the summer. Similarly there’s a huge difference in comfortable temperatures and what’s required to avoid your pipes freezing.
Obviously larger investments mean you’re more comfortable in a major disaster, but a mid sized solar install + backup generator + a grid connection is generally more cost effective.
Add a way for the home electric system to draw power from the vehicles batteries (or even V2G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ), and it becomes even more useful.
Carrington [1] class events keep me up at night.
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...
(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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Solar only makes energy while the sun is shining. Most people want to charge their electric cars at night, unless their employer has a charging station ready for them to use at work. (Many employers have a small number of charging stations for this purpose, but none of them that I'm aware of have enough charging stations for everyone.)
China is doing it.
Haber-Bosch process with green hydrogen...
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.
By then, Edison Electric Institute (a trade-group for utility companies) predicts 70-80 million EVs on the road in the US.
By 2030, 15% of US homes are forecast to have solar on the roof, which would continue covering 100% of the electric use of the nation's electric vehicles.
The average residential solar installation generates enough energy to cover a 14,000-mile-per-year vehicle's charging 3.5-4.5 times over. Each house with solar panels generates enough energy for its cars and some of the neighbors' cars that don't have solar.
I put solar on my roof two years ago. It's the average system size, taking up 2/3rds of the south-facing side of my roof. It cost 1/3rd the price of my car to get installed, it completely covers my fuel use for two cars, and it covers 100% of my home electric and heating bill 9 months out of the year.
EV electric use isn't a problem utilities need to solve so much as a solution to a lot of utilities' problems. 70 million EVs are many gigawatt-hours of battery storage that will be connected to the grid bidirectionally in the not-distant future. They can store renewable energy during the day and feed it back to the grid at night, they can power houses and businesses during peak load events so peaker plants don't need to be spun up, and lots of other things that will make the grid more resilient and cheaper to operate without significant capital expense to the utilities.
The cost per KWH is at least 10x lower, and getting better. This is more than enough to counter the distribution costs.
The same is true for industrial storage.
All told, the only upside to rooftop is avoiding grid operators, Which will just raise their price to counteract any savings on the part of homeowners. everyone is still stuck with them unless they go to municipal operators
This would be a bad idea as it costs 3x more than utility scale PV.
No, that would effect the price the electricity would fetch, not the cost to buy panels and put them on the grid. Home rooftop panels are so much more expensive because of economies of scale.
The load curve over time only matters to the extent that you can entirely remove remote consumption. You can use batteries to smooth out night and day. You can reduce the use of batteries by sponsoring V2H EVs and workplace charging, so that you charge your EV when solar is abundant in the day, and then drive it home to power the rest of your house. But this does nothing for summer vs. winter, it does nothing for wanting to run a clothes dryer or space heater (many of which actually exceed the max power draw of a whole-home battery), it does nothing for wanting to charge your EV up to full before a long road trip.
I am in favor of microgrids, but this is more a statement that we should rationalize our distribution infrastructure rather than that get rid of the grid entirely. When power plants were large centralized industrial buildings that needed a steady supply of fossil fuels delivered by road or rail, it made sense to just build a few of them and then have a huge grid that distributed the electricity everywhere. When you can put solar on every rooftop, it might make more sense to have the smaller remote communities all invest in rooftop or community solar, wire them up in a microgrid of ~1000 homes, put in a big utility-scale battery, but otherwise disconnect them from the main grid so that power lines don't go through tinder forests. And then the big cities draw from big utility-scale solar and wind farms in the desert, connected by conventional power lines along major transportation arteries. But there's still some grid there, it's just a smaller, cheaper grid where you make the connections that are easy to maintain and distribute generation to the remote communities that can run their own self-sufficient grid.
Home solar/battery would provide a level of independence for each home and would lessen the load on the grid for air conditioning alone (almost 20% of grid utilization).
More of both!
> 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.
Isn't the primary source of CO2 from fertilizer production a byproduct of producing hydrogen gas via steam methane reforming?
We can make hydrogen without starting from methane (namely: via electrolysis), but it's not economical in comparison, at this time. (Or clearly able to scale to quite the same degree, for that matter.) But I reject the claim that it's not possible (or, for that matter, that we don't know how to do it). The issue is that the negative externalities from CO2 emissions are not priced in such a way to render existing processes less cost-effective than carbon-free alternatives.
That said, I share some of your skepticism regarding how much we can conceivably decarbonize concrete production.
Are generators inside and outside of Texas already synchronized?
Still no interconnect from the wind belt that starts in the Texas panhandle and goes north to Canada.[1]
[1] https://www.dallasfed.org/-/media/Images/research/energy11/w...