It has now become conventional wisdom that America’s electrical grid sucks. Except America doesn’t really have an electrical grid per se — it has three big separate grids. One serves the Midwest and East, one serves the West, and one serves the Republic of Texas (most of it anyway).
That’s not really ideal, especially in a country that’s planning to add lots of generating capacity from wind and solar. Imagine, say, it’s 4 a.m. out west and the wind is blowing like crazy and yet all the demand is further east. The folks who own all that clean green electricity want to have access to a market where everyone isn’t asleep. [SButtonZ button="digg"]
Now, from the badlands of eastern New Mexico, comes a bold plan to help answer that problem–a giant triangular substation (a “superstation”) that would synchronize the electricity from the three grids by converting it DC current and then direct it to wherever there’s greatest demand (after converting it back to AC, of course). At present there a few small-scale connection points between two grids, but nothing that links all three and can handle large amounts of electricity. According to the WSJ:
The proposed substation, functioning like a traffic roundabout, would use superconducting cable from American Superconductor Corp. of Devens, Mass., capable of carrying 5,000 megawatts of electricity — equivalent to the output of five nuclear-power reactors. Superconducting cable is chilled to minus-300 degrees Fahrenheit, which greatly increases its carrying capacity, and the rights-of-way the cable requires along its path are smaller — and cheaper.
Superconductors always sexy and this would be a high-profile application of an energy transmission technology that’s been gaining momentum for a decade or so. The rights of way issue is an interesting as well — American Superconductor cooked up this graphic to show what 5,000 megawatts looks like both as overhead lines (130 feet high and a 600-foot wide right-of-way) or as one buried cable (no visible structures, only 25 foot wide of right of way).
Oddly, the WSJ says the buried lines are “cheaper.” Even American Superconductor doesn’t claim that–they just say their transmission projects are “cost competitive.” In general, underground lines tend to be quite a bit more expensive to build than overhead lines. But maybe they’re figuring in fewer lawsuits and delays.
New Mexico governor Bill Richardson is on board with the project. The crux–as is so often the case–seems to be getting financing for the $1 billion project. Good luck, guys!
All images via AMSC
Tags: THE GRID
So, how much energy does it take to cool the wire?
thx for your sharing
[...] A Plan To Knit Together The US Electric Grid [...]
Put them underground I say…We can find a lot of useful things for our Duke Right-of-ways! Instant rail corridors crossing through all of our cities.
Duke used to build and operate streetcar lines, btw.
[...] Infrastructurist It has now become conventional wisdom that America’s electrical grid sucks. Except America doesn’t really have an electrical grid per se — it has three big separate grids. One serves the Midwest and East, one serves the West, and one serves the Republic of Texas (most of it anyway). [...]
American Superconductor uses liquid nitrogen to cool their cables. They have a cooling station at the substation where the transmission starts from where the NOS gets pumped into the cable. The energy used to cool the cable very little if any.
The Utilities to be interconnected by this need to come up with the majority of the money for this should it go ahead. What this will allow them to do is, essentially, sell power to anybody anywhere on the continent. They will make their money back in no time. This is one thing the government can do for people is get them to be the responsible ones and have them fork out.
Question – why does (most of) Texas have its own grid? Does it have something to do with availability of oil?
TresAmigas? Are Martin Short, Chevy Chase and Steve Martin gonna have anything to do with this?
How efficient would it be to transmit electricity from the west coast to the east? Wouldn’t an awful lot be lost in transmission? I’m no electrical engineer, but it seems to me developing microgrids with generating stations that serve neighborhoods would go a long way to make electricity generation and transmission more efficient.
Love the cute stuff in the first rendering, implying that the West is powered by solar and wind while Texas and the East make do with wind. Greenwashed graphics: they’re not just for power-company logos anymore.
I’d hate to be anywhere near the contractor who hits that 5000Mw line with the excavator.
Remember call 811 before you dig!
The west has the best opportunities for Solar power plants. I assume that is why it was drawn that way.
@kvnbklyn I believe there is approximately a 3% loss for every 1000km for high voltage dc. There would be about a 12-15% loss to send HVDC across the US. YMMV, the actual loss depends on the cables, engineering, and components used.
For efficient transmission from coast to coast, much more is needed than this cute little substation. Also needed are ultra-high voltage (700+ kV) lines spanning the entire country. Using the current lower voltage transmission lines would result in too much losses for transmission to be economical over these distances.
Just wait for the Chinese to hack the computers that control it and then presto! All the electricity in the U.S. is shut off!
@Vin An old slate article has an explanation why Texas has it’s own Electric Grid. The gist of it goes back to WWII and the desire to make sure Texas war factories would not be stopped by East or West coast power outages. And Texas has lots of coal and natural gas.
Regarding the 3%/1000 km number for HVDC via superconductor: what is the corresponding loss number for the current HVAC system?
Just wondering…
Thanks for ignoring Alaska’s and Hawaii’s electric grids.
[...] A Plan To Knit Together The U.S Electric Grid [...]
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