Beefing Up Grid is Critical, But Don’t Panic – This is Not Cool (thinc.blog)
April 18, 2024
New roadmap released this week, for expanding grid capacity quickly without waiting for new transmission to be built.
Huge topic, I’ll start summarizing here and have more postings later.
Canary Media:
The DOE’s three-to-five-year roadmap starts with directing billions of dollars into ?“innovative grid deployments,” featuring technologies ranging from advanced grid equipment to next-generation grid-control software platforms, that can serve as templates for utilities across the nation.
It also recommends that utilities and their state regulators alter existing policies — like cost-of-service structures, which reward utilities for spending money on grid infrastructure — that have stymied adoption of these technologies in the U.S., compared with in Europe, Australia, and other parts of the world.
The goal of the DOE’s plan is to make such technologies a standard part of how power grids are built and operated across the country. That could solve big grid challenges in far less time than it takes to build new power lines — something the country is struggling to do, despite the urgent need to rapidly connect more clean energy to the grid in order to displace fossil fuels.
“We all know that we need new expansion of the grid, but we also all know that it takes over a decade right now to build some new transmission lines,” Maria Robinson, director of the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, said in a Monday press event introducing the report. ?“The solutions that we talk about in this report are ready to go today and can serve as a bridge to address near-term concerns and needs.”
But that first challenge may be the easy part. The next step is convincing utilities to get on board.
The group is inherently cautious; keeping the grid up and running is their ?“number one job,” and they tend to see novel technologies as a potential threat to maintaining that reliability, Robinson said.
They also operate under a very specific set of economic incentives: Almost all U.S. utilities make money by earning a regulated rate of return on capital investments like new power lines. Money spent improving the efficiency of existing infrastructure, by contrast, is passed on to customers at cost without generating a return on investment.
As DOE’s report notes, ?“In the absence of a financial incentive or regulatory mandate, utilities are likely to prioritize investments in other projects that generate higher financial returns, rather than prioritizing solutions that may drive better overall system or societal impact.”
And failing to prioritize investment in these technologies could mean failing to deal with the biggest near-term challenge for the country’s clean power goals: expanding grid capacity to connect the hundreds of gigawatts of wind, solar, and energy storage projects now facing yearslong wait times and multimillion-dollar grid upgrade charges.
These technologies could also help grid operators handle increasing grid reliability issues caused by extreme weather events, by giving them more flexibility to reroute power flows from where electricity is available to where it’s needed. They could also help grids serve the looming demand for power from data centers, factories and electric vehicles, and homes, businesses, and industrial facilities trying to replace fossil fuels with electricity.
Always prescient and well informed Rob Meyer has some nuance. Grid demands may be going up, but panic may not be in order.
Heatmap:
In a 1999 Forbes article, a pair of conservative lawyers, Peter Huber and Mark Mills, warned that personal computers and the internet were about to overwhelm the fragile U.S. grid.
Information technology already devoured 8% to 13% of total U.S. power demand, Huber and Mills claimed, and that share would only rise over time. “It’s now reasonable to project,” they wrote, “that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy within the next decade.” (Emphasis mine.)
Over the next 18 months, investment banks including JP Morgan and Credit Suisse repeated the Forbes estimate of internet-driven power demand, advising their customers to pile into utilities and other electricity-adjacent stocks. Although it was unrelated, California’s simultaneous blackout crisisdeepened the sense of panic. For a moment, experts were convinced: Data centers and computers would drain the country’s energy resources.
They could not have been more wrong. In fact, Huber and Mills had drastically mismeasured the amount of electricity used by PCs and the internet. Computing ate up perhaps 3% of total U.S. electricity in 1999, not the roughly 10% they had claimed. And instead of staring down a period of explosive growth, the U.S. electric grid was in reality facing a long stagnation. Over the next two decades, America’s electricity demand did not grow rapidly — or even, really, at all. Instead, it flatlined for the first time since World War II. The 2000s and 2010s were the first decades without “load growth,” the utility industry’s jargon for rising power demand, since perhaps the discovery of electricity itself.
Meyer’s article is too long and rich in detail to do justice here, by all means check out the link – I’ll have a second post on this soon. |
