Green in late 2019 reported that the North American electrical power grid is fragmented, which wastes renewable energy and increases electric bills. The previous administration held up upgrades. In January, 2019, China’s main electrical grid operator announced that it has powered up a transmission line that sets world records for voltage, distance and power. The line is used for long-distance transmission of renewable energy that was wasted due to lack of transmission capacity in China, and use of the line is helping China gradually transition from coal to other energy sources, a massive undertaking given China’s overall energy growth.
The U.S. has a similar problem. Electricity generated by Texas wind farms often cannot power homes in Arkansas because the US lacks transmission capacity. The problem is so severe that, as Jesper Starn reported in Bloomberg wholesale electricity prices have even gone negative on days when excess renewable energy is generated in some regions. These negative prices are not passed on to consumers — instead, they signal owners of fossil-fuel-based electricity generators to shut down temporarily and restart later, an expensive process that increases electricity prices overall.
Liu Zhenya at the 2017 World Hydropower Congress in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Liu, a pioneer of UHVDC transmission in China, advocated a similar approach in Africa to promote large-scale hydroelectric, wind, and solar power. To help overcome this problem worldwide, Liu Zhenya, who championed China’s grid growth until he left China’s state grid operator in 2013, helped establish the Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization (GEIDCO) that aims to repeat China’s grid successes in other countries’ less-advanced grid interconnections. As part of that effort, at the 2019 Global Grid Form in Vancouver GEIDCO made a proposal to improve the grid powering North America.
Peter Fairly reports in IEEE Spectrum that GEIDCO is thinking big. They propose a series of ultrahigh-voltage direct-current (UHVDC) lines running east-west across the US, along with similar north-south lines allowing access to Canada’s hydropower. Another 5,200-kilometer line would go from Mexico to Peru. These UHVDC lines would let North and South American grids exchange power efficiently long-distance, without having to synchronize their alternating-current cycles.
Under the GEIDCO proposal, Fairly writes:
Electrification to decarbonize vehicles, home heating, and industries would proceed 60% faster than the most ambitious US electrification scenarios projected by the Electric Power Research Institute…. Overall, energy-related greenhouse gas emissions would drop 80% by 2050, relative to a business-as-usual scenario—even as average power generating costs drop.
So, what’s not to like? In a word, politics. In “Electricity as Coercion: Is There a Risk of Strategic Denial of Service?”, Joshua Busby of the University of Texas at Austin writes that other nations are wary of China’s advice, worrying that cross-border grids will operate under an international rules and operation code defined by GEIDCO where China will have major influence — reminiscent of how other nations are wary of Internet standards created under US influence. And within the US, Texas has jealously guarded its grid and has refused to integrate with the rest of the country even though integration would mean lower prices and fewer greenhouse-gas emissions.
The seven ties between the US eastern and western interconnections were commissioned from 1977 to 2005 and have a combined capacity of 1.3 gigawatts (GW). China’s single new long-distance line has a capacity of 12 GW, nearly ten times as much and enough to power ten million US households.
Also, the Trump administration and Republicans give low priority to improving the US electrical grid. Although a previous president signed a January 2017 executive order about the grid, the order was limited to gutting environmental and other legal rules and nothing else has actually been done. Fairly writes that last year the previous-administration political appointees in the Department of Energy even blocked publication of a modeling study of a proposed integration of the US’s eastern and western grids. This year, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has modeled a more-ambitious proposal for integrating US, Canada and Mexico, but this model is currently bottled up under governmental review as well.
So while the U.S. dithers and delays and distracts under an incompetant previous administration, polluting the skies and costing consumers, the most ambitious proposal for improving the US electrical grid is coming from experts based in the technology-savvy and can-do nation of China.
[Maybe Biden can do something about this in an Infrastructure Bill in congress....?}
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