If the goals of the “Green New Deal” are a political minefield, so, too, are the most likely strategies for reaching its target of very high national levels of renewable energy output.
A shelf of authoritative studies under the Department of Energy’s sponsorship dating back to George W. Bush’s presidency define how to take a big step in that direction. Their answer — build a network of long-distance, ultra-high-voltage transmission lines to widely share wind and solar power across the continent’s time zones.
But the strategy has faced overpowering headwinds of not-in-my-backyard opposition from residents and not-through-my-state political pushback. It’s also been rare for Congress to put aside partisan politics and pass major legislation facilitating transmission corridors.
“If you’re going to do a 100 percent clean energy portfolio — that is really 70 to 80 percent of electric power from renewables — I don’t know how you avoid huge transmission builds,” said Richard Sedano, president of the Regulatory Assistance Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank advocating a clean energy future. “It’s either that or overbuilding the system so much with surplus renewables and batteries” that consumers will be hammered.
“I don’t see how you have a national clean energy standard without significant federally mandated or incented transmission build cutting across regions of the country,” added Travis Kavulla, a former Montana utility commissioner and president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, now with the R Street Institute in Washington, D.C.
DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) issued the Eastern Wind Integration and Transmission Study in 2010, with strategies to provide 20 percent of the electricity supply east of the Rocky Mountains from wind energy by 2024. It counseled: “The integration of 20 percent wind energy is technically feasible, but will require significant expansion of the transmission infrastructure and system operational changes.”
The most detailed of the analyses is NREL’s ongoing Interconnections Seam Study based on massive computer simulations of power flows. It outlined one scenario with three ultra-high-voltage direct-current lines spanning the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River, with other new lines moving western power eastward.
Because grid operators can control the direction of power flows on direct-current lines, surplus afternoon solar power from the Southwest could stream into Southeastern states at dusk. Other lines could ship unused wind energy from the Great Plains into major cities in the Great Lakes and East Coast regions, or the other way into California.
By linking time zones, the variability of wind and solar power at different times of day becomes a strength, not a weakness, explained project leader Aaron Bloom.
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