The Green New Deal for the United States calls for 100% renewable or carbon-free electricity by 2030. The proposal faces not only massive political hurdles, but physical barriers too. Chief among them is America’s ancient and creaking transmission grid. Upgrading it is not an impossible task, but it does require citizens willing to accept new wires and investors confident they will make money. Texas found a way of achieving both, in the process becoming a global renewable energy leader
Green aims
: In February 2019, Democrat Congress members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey unveiled a broad-reaching Green New Deal aimed at: “Meeting 100% of the power demand in the US through clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources, including by dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources; and by deploying new capacity.”
Political debate: The deal has been dismissed by Republicans and many Democrats, but has succeeded in putting climate change and the energy transition at the top of the debating charts among the Democratic candidates vying to succeed Donald Trump in the White House in the November 2020 elections.
Rickety wires: There are more than just political barriers to achieving 100% renewable energy goals in the US. There is also a material lack of sufficient wires capacity to take the needed volumes of renewables electricity from where it is generated
Key quote:“We are charging iPhones and powering smart TVs with infrastructure built when large portions of the country still did not have access to the electricity needed for a simple light bulb.”
America’s antiquated and Balkanised electricity grid is rated D-plus by the American Society of Civil Engineers, said Tom Kiernan, CEO and president of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), during a Congressional climate crisis committee hearing on 13 June 2019. Some of the US’s transmission lines are over 100 years old, AWEA’s senior vice president Amy Farrell highlighted at an event in Washington a month earlier. “Think about that — we are charging iPhones and powering smart TVs with infrastructure built when large portions of the country still did not have access to the electricity needed for a simple light bulb,” she continued. The same day, the association released a report, Grid Vision: The Electric Highway to a 21st Century Economy, calling for an interconnected, modern transmission grid. The US has some 200,000 miles (321,869 kilometres) of high voltage transmission wires across three interconnected electric transmission grids — the eastern, western and Texas interconnections — supporting 1060 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity. Of that, about 130 GW is wind and solar.
High costs
A 100% decarbonised grid would require an additional 1600 GW of renewable generating capacity and a $700 million transmission build-out, says Dan Shreve, global head of wind analysis at the consultancy Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables. In late June 2019, the consultancy released a report estimating it would cost $4.5 trillion to transition to 100% renewables by 2030, including transmission costs. Some 17 terawatt-hours of storage would be required for a decarbonised grid, says WoodMac. AWEA’s Grid Vision report, however, stresses that storage is complementary to transmission. _“_At high penetrations of wind and solar energy, it becomes necessary to move large quantities of energy across time and space. Energy storage cannot move electricity from one place to another; only transmission can do that,” says the report. A decarbonised grid is already becoming more of a reality as coal plants are retired. Approximately 65 GW of coal-fired electric generating capacity has gone offline since 2011, says BloombergNEF. Another 80 GW of coal plants will be retired by 2030, WoodMac projects.
NIMBY opposition
A material lack of sufficient wires capacity to take the needed volumes of renewables electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed is a “substantial hindrance” to achieving 100% renewable energy goals, says Shreve. “Time and again, major transmission initiatives are scrapped due to NIMBY [not in my backyard] opposition, especially in circumstances where the transmission line in question is merely crossing state lines,” he says. Cost allocation for lines crossing multiple states or involving various regional transmission or grid system operators is also becoming a major issue. Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor, working with colleagues at the University of California and Aalborg University in Denmark, projects a decarbonised US grid in 2050 could be met with 31% onshore wind, 19% offshore wind, 31% utility-scale photovoltaics, 7% rooftop solar photovoltaic, 7% concentrated solar power with storage, 1.25% geothermal power, 3% hydro and smaller amounts of wave and tidal power. To support this, $8 trillion would need to be invested in generation, storage, transmission and distribution, he says. Of that, storage and new transmission and distribution would cost some 13% or $1 trillion, of which a quarter would be for long-distance transmission. The remainder of the cost would be generation. Jacobson says a transition to 100% clean, renewable energy by 2030 is technically and economically feasible: “But for social and political reasons, it will probably take longer, maybe until 2050.” Others see 100% renewables in that timeframe as too ambitious, with 80-85% as more feasible. In a 2016 paper in the journal Nature Climate Change, Chris Clack of Vibrant Clean Energy, a renewables data and software company, and others found that carbon dioxide emissions from the US electricity sector can be reduced by up to 80%, compared with 1990 levels, with current technologies, without storage and without leading to a higher levelised cost of energy. This decrease would be achieved by moving away from the regionally divided grid and towards long-distance high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) transmission.
Cost allocation
As for the hurdles faced by transmission developers, Michael Goggin of Grid Strategies, a Washington firm working to help integrate clean energy in the grid, says the single largest problem facing grid developers in the US is the lack of effective cost-allocation for regional transmission lines planned to cross operating boundaries. Regional transmission operators (RTOs) also often only plan ten to 20 years ahead, whereas transmission lines can last 60-80 years, he says, so the benefits of building more wires capacity is greatly understated. Order 1000, passed by the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission (FERC) in 2011, was designed to fix both the barriers to planning and paying for regional and inter-regional transmission. “Unintended consequences and lacklustre implementation”, particularly for inter-regional transmission, have, however, left all sides unhappy, says AWEA’s grid report. “It has been eight years since Order 1000 was passed and the time is ripe for FERC to fix what is clearly broken transmission policy,” it states. FERC has faced “political push-back” regarding Order 1000, including from utilities that own generation, but not transmission, in areas of grid congestion. They may benefit from higher electricity prices caused by congested wires, says Goggin, giving little reason for them to support new policy. RTOs can also see themselves as business rivals and may operate their grids differently, with the result they are loathe to collaborate, says Mike Skelly, founder of Clean Line Energy, a private developer of wind-friendly long-distance HVDC transmission. Clean Line, which was planning lines for transmitting 16.5 GW of wind energy, folded earlier in 2019 after facing too many obstacles. Three of its five projects have been divested and are still proceeding. Skelly, who now works for financial advisory company Lazard, calls for FERC to implement Order 1000. He also suggests a 35-40% federal investment tax credit for transmission lines of 345 kilovolts and above, to help pay for them. And he calls for a federal backstop for the permitting of lines so the federal government can step in if, after a reasonable time-lag following the filing for a permit, a transmission developer has not obtained the needed local permits.
Green deal realism
America’s Green New Deal is almost certainly not going to pass in its current form. The broad-reaching and aggressive package, named for the 1930s New Deal that put post-Depression America back to work, was unveiled in February 2019 with much fanfare by Democrat Congress members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey. The crux of the ten-year plan is a goal of “meeting 100% of the power demand in the US through clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources, including by dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources; and by deploying new capacity.” At issue is that the non-binding resolution is just that; it is not a package of laws with legislative teeth. The deal also calls for fundamental and unlikely changes in American society that are nothing to do with the environment — ranging from universal health care to guaranteed jobs with benefits. Nor would it pass even the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives in its current form, having divided Democrats into progressives and moderates, say Washington insiders. _“_The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?” said a sceptical Nancy Pelosi, the powerful Democratic speaker of the House after it was introduced. The Senate is controlled by Republicans who have painted the plan as something akin to socialism, a term that terrifies the average American voter. Moreover, even if passed by both houses of Congress, the plan would also have to be signed by climate denier President Donald Trump. On the plus side, the proposed deal has already changed debate among the Democratic candidates vying to succeed Trump in the White House in the November 2020 elections. For the first time in a US presidential campaign, climate has emerged as one of the most pressing issues and on July 9, 2019 Democrats in both houses of congress introduced a resolution to declare a climate emergency in the US. But whoever wins next year’s presidential and congressional vote, action to mitigate climate change and clear the way for renewable energy with massive development of the transmission grid may still take time. Head of global wind analysis Dan Shreve at consultancy Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables believes it unlikely a national carbon tax will see the day before 2028. Such a tax would facilitate the spending required for transmission grid expansion, provide an incentive for clean-energy research and would help overcome opposition in states that want to protect fossil-fuel generation, he says.
Chicken and egg
One of the planning problems facing transmission developers is the chicken and egg of which comes first, the generation or transmission, says Mike Jacobs, senior energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a not-for-profit organisation. The 2005 Energy Policy Act gave the Department of Energy authority to conduct studies of electric transmission congestion and then designate areas experiencing transmission constraints or congestion that adversely affected consumers. Separately, FERC was given the authority to issue permits within these congested areas to construct transmission lines as a backstop under certain circumstances in case state siting activities were not progressing adequately. But DOE and FERC have not collaborated enough and the law was successfully challenged in court by states such as Arizona, which saw the benefits of planned new transmission capacity accruing too much to its larger neighbour, California, he says. Grid Strategies’ Goggin also notes the federal government has backstop authority for siting interstate natural gas pipelines, which means natural gas may be favoured when competing with renewable energy. And Jacobs of the Union for Concerned Scientists says that in regions with fewer vertically integrated utilities owning both generation plants and transmission there is less planning.
Trailblazing Texas
One approach being tried in the US to ease siting problems is the SOO Green Renewable Rail, announced in March 2019. The line, named for a Canadian Pacific railway, would be underground, along the existing rail line, says Joe DeVito, president of the developer DC DevCo. Investors in the 349 mile 2GW HVDC line, to run from windy Iowa eastwards, connecting the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) and PJM Interconnection regions, include Siemens and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a Danish fund. Permitting has not started, says DeVito, but siting should be easier because it will run along an existing right of way. DeVito says that at a cost of $2.5 billion, investment would only be 1.8 times more than an above-ground equivalent. The line could be operational by 2024, he says. The US is not alone in facing these problems. Goggin says Europe’s grids are also often Balkanised and that development of transmission lines can be hampered by dense population. China with its strong centralised government has developed lines as much as three or four times the size of the lines planned by Clean Line. But he says: “There is no country that is a great example of transmission development except for the Republic of Texas.” Texas has almost 25 GW of installed wind capacity, nearly three times as much as any other US state. This development has been boosted by a huge and much-vaunted $6.8 billion expansion of transmission lines to deliver renewable energy from five competitive renewable energy zones (CREZs), to load centres in the south and east of the state such as Dallas and Houston. CREZs are designated geographic areas, introduced in 2005 by the Texas state legislature and based on an area with renewable energy production potential, but with little transmission. The CREZ initiative by Texas remains the largest in the US. It is often held up as visionary and proof that much-needed transmission can be developed once it is made an attractive investment. The CREZ lines can transmit 18.5 GW of wind power over a total of 3600 miles. The planning, siting and payment for the renewables-friendly CREZ initiative was made easier because the lines were within one state, albeit one that is the size of France, and they were within the territory of a single regional grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which oversees almost all of Texas. Transmission line construction projects that cross multiple US states are typically hindered by having to deal with a patchwork of state and federal regulation. Landowners may also balk more at a transmission line crossing their fields if cities in another state are the main beneficiaries. In 2005, Texas lawmakers increased the minimum standard for the proportion of renewable energy in the state’s electricity portfolio and required utilities to comply with it. At around the same time, the state ordered the Public Utility Commission (PUC) of Texas to identify potential CREZs. The PUC, which regulates utilities, and ERCOT were told to plan transmission lines. Development of the system was launched in 2009 and most of it was completed by 2013. The cost of the lines was allocated to electricity ratepayers across ERCOT’s territory, which includes more than 25 million customers, and is estimated to have added several dollars to a monthly residential utility bill.
No more NIMBY
Locating routes for the new wires was time-consuming. Oncor, the main developer of $2 billion of CREZ lines stretching about 1000 miles, said it initially invited some 13,000 landowners to 33 public meetings. Once the exact routes of the lines were established, about 1500 impacted landowners were then invited to another 30 meetings. The initial budget for the expansion of the grid was set at $4.9 billion, but it was later hiked by almost $2 billion, in part because of inflation, but also to accommodate longer routes that encountered less local opposition. In late 2013, Texas finally flipped the switch on the new transmission projects, a boon to renewables developers and consumers. The lines help alleviate grid congestion and wind power curtailment (when projects are told to shut down because a section of the grid is at capacity and cannot take more electricity) and boosted deployment of clean energy projects. Only 2.2% of potential wind energy generation within the ERCOT grid was curtailed in 2017, down from a hefty 17% in 2009 before the CREZ initiative, says Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s most recent Wind Technologies Market Report.
Big savings inspire more
Goggin says the CREZ lines are saving customers a great deal of money. He cites a study by consultancy TXP Inc for the Wind Solar Alliance, American Wind Energy Association and Solar Energy Industries Association published in autumn 2018. It estimates that renewables, mostly wind power, saved the state $5.7 billion in electricity costs from 2010 to 2017. “Since CREZ enabled a large share of those renewables and since the transmission lines have provided reliability and other benefits that are not quantified, I think it is safe to say the lines will pay for themselves many times over during their long lifetime,” says Goggin. CREZ has helped inspire other smaller initiatives in the US that allocate the cost of renewables-friendly transmission throughout a region. By 2020, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, a regional transmission operator (RTO) covering a territory almost the size of Germany, is planning multi-value projects — where planners take into account the ability of renewables to provide reliability, economic value and the value of generator interconnections. The projects amount to 14 GW of wind, nearly as much wind capacity as operating in the whole of France in mid-2019. In the Upper Midwest, the $2 billion CapX2020 projects were completed in 2017 as a joint initiative of 11 transmission‐owning utilities in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. It was the largest development of new transmission in the region in 40 years, helping connect more than 5 GW of wind power. In the territory of the Southwest Power Pool in Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, another RTO, the “highway/byway” project, also with a regional cost allocation, led to priority transmission projects that helped uncork 3.2 GW of wind projects. And in early July 2019, MidAmerican Energy completed a 127 km high-voltage regional transmission line, Multi-Value Project 7, designed in part to carry wind power from southeastern Iowa to Missouri.
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Ros Davidson