These cumbersome, excessively thick wires serve as the lifelines of our energy infrastructure. As they integrate with vast wind farms, hydroelectric plants, photovoltaic services, and other energy facilities at city edges, massive substations transform voltage levels before feeding electricity into homes and businesses via distribution lines that resemble city streets in their complexity.
The United States operates a trio of primary grid systems: the Western Interconnection, the Eastern Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnected System. Regional grid operators, including the California Independent System Operator, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, and the New York Independent System Operator, manage smaller local grids that are connected, to varying degrees, within these larger networks.
The implementation of bidirectional transmission lines is crucial for efficiently exchanging electrical energy between different parts of the national grid, thereby reducing emissions and strengthening the overall resilience of the power supply network. This allows for the integration of a wider variety of independent power generators into the grid. While solar energy may be declining in a specific region, it’s possible for other renewable sources like wind or hydropower to take its place elsewhere? The ability to stabilize variability in renewable energy sources across regions and seasons, conversely, diminishes the reliance on consistent fossil fuel production.
According to James Hewett, Supervisor at Breakthrough Energy’s US Coverage Division, there are often alternative wind or hydro energy sources available somewhere. “Currently, the primary bottleneck lies in mobilizing resources from their distant locations to where they are most needed.”
Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Breakthrough Energy agency, has no portfolio companies related to the North Plains Connector project or GridUnited.
This resilience is particularly crucial during severe weather events, where regional power grids can be severely impacted by wildfires, floods, hurricanes, or heatwaves, causing outages that affect multiple areas at once. As circumstances dictate, such crises might arise on occasion, as starkly illustrated by the devastating consequences of recent heatwaves.
Research has demonstrated that integrating national power grids can significantly boost the global share of electrical energy. A recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that upgrading the interconnections between the US’s main grids and the areas within them yields the greatest economic benefits among transmission initiatives, potentially generating more than $100 million in annual value savings per gigawatt of added capacity. The examination assumes that the trace operations are functioning efficiently at full capacity, along with other simplifying premises.
Experts contend that grid interconnections can yield substantial returns on investment over time, primarily due to enhanced efficiencies, which enable grid operators to identify cheaper power sources in real-time and facilitate regions’ reliance on fewer energy installations by leveraging the redundancy provided by neighboring grids.
