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Any effective plan to tackle climate change depends on the underlying technology: long wires stretched over tall towers.

The United States needs to add hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission lines over the coming decades to weave fragmented regional power grids into an interconnected grid capable of supporting massive influx of renewable energy sources.

The national network of short spur and long high voltage wires will deliver wind, solar and hydroelectric power where it is needed, when it is available across the country. This can help provide reliable backup power when heat waves or winter storms cause power shortages in the region, and meet growing demand as homes and businesses increasingly rely on electricity to power their vehicles, heating systems, and more.

This is a grand vision with several serious flaws. First, building the necessary transmission lines in this decade alone could cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The study, led by Princeton, has shown that the US will need an additional $ 350 billion to develop the capacity it needs over the next nine years. This is consistent with a scenario in which wind and solar power will provide half of the country’s electricity by 2030, allowing the country to fully reduce emissions by mid-century.

Even if the government and businesses free up the necessary funds, there is an even bigger challenge ahead: states, counties, cities and towns across the country will have to quickly sign dozens of new power lines. And the US has become terrible at allowing such multi-state projects.

A series of efforts to bring cheap and clean hydropower from Canada, wind from the Great Plains, and renewable energy mixes from the Southwest have been bogged down in court battles or rejected for years, often because one region objected to the availability of wires. cut through his ground. Even those large network projects that have been built can easily take a decade to go through the approval process.

Perhaps help will finally come. A bipartisan Senate-backed $ 1 trillion infrastructure package that provides billions of dollars for power lines. It also includes some provisions that may prove even more important than money by strengthening and clarifying federal powers to approve projects.

However, the package will represent only a small initial investment and permitting changes that will be required.

‘Lagging behind’

There is no single grid in the United States. It has three legacy, disconnected systems, mostly built around the middle of the last century, with limited capacity to exchange electricity between states and larger regions. This is a problem because power plants can be hundreds of miles away from major cities where electricity demand is greatest.

Isolated grids mean that electricity from fluctuating sources such as sun and wind can only be delivered up to a certain point, wasting some of the production and lowering prices when generation exceeds regional demand during particularly windy and sunny periods (which is increasingly happening and more as the share of these sources grows). For example, California cannot deliver surplus solar power to the Midwest in the middle of a summer day, or harness stable wind power from, say, Oklahoma, when the sun begins to sink on the West Coast.

But grid operators can use electricity at the lowest price available over a much larger area and deliver it to places with high demand, said Doug Arent, executive director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This includes wherever renewables generate electricity, whether it’s wind in Wyoming or solar power in Florida.

Long distance high voltage transmission lines also allow solar, wind, hydro and geothermal power plants to be developed in regions favorable to their supply of weather, geological or waterways, providing developers with a large customer base in cities, which may be a suitable option. a zone or two away.

A recent presentation from the Lawrence Berkeley lab noted that there are already more than 750 gigawatts of power generation proposals in five regions of the United States waiting to be connected to transmission lines that could deliver electricity to consumers. The vast majority of them are solar and wind projects. (By comparison, the entire fleet of large U.S. plants can produce just over 1,100 gigawatts.)

Other countries are advancing rapidly in this area. China has become the clear world leader in high voltage transmission, building tens of thousands of miles of these lines to connect its power plants to cities across the vast country. But while China developed 260 gigawatts of capacity between 2014 and 2021, all of North America added just seven, according to a poll by Iowa State University.

“The US is lagging behind, but it has every reason to catch up,” said James McCallie, professor of power systems engineering at Iowa State University and co-author of the National Power Grid Study, published late last year.

Part of what it takes

So how could the United States begin to close this gap?

First, more money will be required. While the Biden administration has boasted that the infrastructure package calls for $ 73 billion for “clean energy transmission,” the funds are spread across a wide range of clean energy efforts, including research, development and demonstration projects in areas such as carbon capture and clean hydrogen.

In the current version of the infrastructure package, only $ 10 billion to $ 12 billion is allocated specifically for the construction of power towers and wires, said Rob Grumlich, president of the consulting firm Grid Strategies.

This is part of the amount that the Princeton study showed the US will need to invest over the next nine years. While federal spending is meant to unblock private equity, the US will still need to invest tens of billions more to reach the scale it needs this decade, according to Jesse Jenkins, co-author of the Princeton study and associate professor at the university.

It also sets up a $ 2.5 billion revolving credit program for projects, effectively making the DOE the first customer for the new transmission lines. This federal funding could help implement the labor-intensive power transmission projects required, but before the developer finds clients. Observers say this could alleviate the perennial chicken-and-egg problem between increasing electricity production and building the lines needed to transport it.

Ultimately, the federal government may sell these rights to the wastewater treatment plants, which need access to the lines when they are connected to the grid.

It’s a promising policy tool that “just needs another zero on this budget line,” Jenkins says.

Permits

Despite the lack of money, the proposed infrastructure bill addresses the approval issues.

A long-standing problem in many parts of the US is that generating capacity and energy needs are growing faster than the transmission systems needed to support them. People and businesses need cheap and reliable electricity, but few have the necessary towers and transmission wires, especially if they seem to mainly deliver electricity and economic benefits to remote areas. There are also frequent criticisms of aesthetics, environmental protection, social justice and business competition.

“If we’re going to achieve our climate goals, we need to find ways to approve these big power transmission projects – and we’ve historically struggled to do so,” said Lindsay Walter, associate director of the Climate and Energy Program at Third Way. , a center-left think tank in Washington DC, in an email.

The Energy Act 2005 aimed to address these tensions by giving the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) the opportunity to step in and sign projects that could ease restrictions on electricity transmission in certain areas, declared so-called national transmission corridors. But so far, the Department of Energy has identified only two such areas: in the mid-Atlantic Ocean and in Southern California.

In addition, a federal appeals court ultimately limited the powers of FERC, believing that it could only sign projects if states or other jurisdictions delayed an application for more than a year. The court ruled that it was not in a position to overturn the State’s rejection of the applications in accordance with the law.