We are in the early stages of the electricity boom. From renewable energy sources, to artificial intelligence, to electric cars, the sectors most vital to the green transition need electricity, and much more of it than ever before.
As these technologies expand, massive increases in energy consumption across the country expose deep vulnerabilities in the grid, the sprawling network of thousands of power plants and some 500,000 miles of power cables that provides electricity to millions of homes and businesses across the country.
The network’s size is rivaled only by its complexity, with it being called “the most complex machine ever built.” Nor is it a uniform national system: The Lower 48 is divided into a patchwork of 10 independent operators, some of whom work with each other and some of whom don’t, and which are governed by local, state and federal authorities. laws at one time.
Much of the grid’s central infrastructure — the actual wires and electrical transformers that move electricity from Point A to Point B — is half a century old, and woefully ill-equipped to handle what is shaping up as a generational boom in energy demand. Everyone is playing catch up.
“We have a tremendous increase in demand for electricity,” said Neil Chatterjee, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the federal agency that regulates electricity transmission and pricing. luck. “In order to meet that demand, while maintaining reliability and affordability — and also while decarbonizing — we just need to build more transportation. And that has been very difficult to do.
Transmission: the forgotten foundation of the network
Although flashy energy projects — including wind farms, solar panels, and nuclear plants — have attracted more than half a trillion dollars in the past three years, according to White House estimates, nothing is even close to that amount of money allocated. For electrical plumbing. That keeps the network going.
“Much of our transportation infrastructure is aging, the bulk of it 50 to 60 years old,” said Romany Webb, deputy director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. luck. “This creates challenges with respect to the energy transition… We have not continued, in an effective manner, to modernize and expand the grid to meet evolving challenges.”
In general, there are two components to the US grid: generation and transmission. You’re probably most familiar with generation: More than 10,000 power plants across the country convert energy in the form of coal or oil (or, increasingly, renewable inputs including wind and solar) into electricity. But most homes, offices and factories are not located directly next to power plants, so we rely on miles of transmission cables to move electricity to where it is needed. The rise in renewable energy has ensured that dynamic solar panels are most effective in the Sun Belt, for example, where they require long power lines to transport that electricity to consumers across the country who live in cloudier regions.
This is where things get complicated. Transmitting electricity over long distances means you need large companies to manage distribution across entire regions. The United States has ten regional network operators, most of which talk to each other — but that’s not true everywhere. The Texas network, for example, is a completely separate island from the rest of the country. This made headlines in February 2021, when its grid was unable to handle a severe winter storm and was unable to borrow any additional power from its neighbors, leading to widespread power outages and nearly $200 billion in property damage.
In some ways, the network’s fragmented structure is a product of its roots. “We are evolving from an industry that started with 3,000 small, isolated facilities that served local electricity consumers through local generation. But for today’s economies, what they really need are high-capacity long-distance lines. luck. “We’ve been struggling with our old structure while trying to meet these new needs.”
Largely due to its technical complexity, the power grid does not receive as much attention as other areas of the energy landscape: power cables do not have the futuristic flair of nuclear fusion or solar farms, and the high geopolitical drama that the region is experiencing. The oil industry is much more exciting than the bureaucracy of building new grid infrastructure. But as it became clear that the grid would be a critical bottleneck to bringing new AI, electric vehicle, and renewable energy projects online, grid transmission was finally getting its moment in the popular and political spotlight. This has costs and benefits.
New rules, new challenges
On Monday, after years of work behind the scenes, FERC voted to approve a long-awaited final rule that is expected to significantly reduce hurdles to getting new transmission capacity online and free up space to increase grid capacity to meet demand: in the simplest terms. , just connect more power cables.
“I’ve been working on these policy issues since 2003. For more than 20 years, I’ve watched FERC advance to Congress and Congress back away from these really complex and wonky technical questions,” said Chatterjee, who is now a senior counsel at Hogan Lovells Law Firm in D.C.: ‘Someone has to step up and make a bold decision every once in a while and break some china.’ (FERC) made a tough decision, and they’re going to take a lot of pressure for that…but the fact is it was on someone “Once he pulls that band-aid off and makes the tough decisions.”
Transmission upgrades are a difficult project to sell on two fronts. No one denies that upgrading the 50-year-old power cables on which the grid is built is vital; They are simply not equipped to handle the capabilities that emerging technologies require. But building transportation infrastructure is a political minefield that faces near-constant opposition from parties including rival energy companies, NIMBY landowners, and partisan lawmakers. Some recent transportation projects have been stuck in limbo for nearly two decades.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to modernizing the grid is the bizarre and disjointed governance of the grid itself, where competing priorities from private operators, federal and state lawmakers, and regulatory agencies have stymied many proposals that cross state lines and involve multiple stakeholders who don’t play nice together.
“Divided authority over transportation between the federal government and the states has certainly created some challenges,” Webb said. “While we were looking to move to a more regionally based grid, which has all kinds of benefits in terms of supporting decarbonization and improving resilience, state-by-state (power) becomes a real challenge when you look at building large, long transmission lines between states.”
This issue – the role of states in financing transportation lines that cross multiple regions – has emerged as a political flashpoint in recent years. Some Republican politicians have criticized proposals that would make taxpayers bear the burden of transportation upgrades tied to renewable energy projects they don’t support. Some Democratic opponents argue that increasing capacity will help reduce prices and power outages. Insiders insist that the network is one area where politics does not belong.
“These days, anything can become partisan,” Gramlich said. “It would be a great irony if transmission policy that was led by Republicans 20 years ago now appears to be led by Democrats, and it gets stuck in this partisan framework… The FERC rule that came out (Monday) is actually for the economy.” And reliability.” . There’s really no reason to get a different answer between red states versus blue states, or Republicans versus Democrats.
As energy demand begins to push the grid to the breaking point, the pressure to upgrade and modernize electricity transmission infrastructure will increase, politics be damned.
“As consumption increases, there will be a greater sense of urgency,” said Jeremy Fisher, senior strategy advisor at the Sierra Club. luck. “With capacity coming online to meet some of the AI-induced load demands, there will be some difficult decisions.”
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
