EDIT2: Here's what a 765 kV line looks like: https://maps.app.goo.gl/3fV1hFuQmpq3hVNx5
Map of US electric grid: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=d409...
Real wiring is dominated by current, resistance of the conductor, and cooling.[0,1]
The way out is to rebuild with much high voltages and live monitoring, optionally with superconducting segments like Nexans where advantageous.
0. Ikeda, Yoshirô and Katsuhiko Yoneta. Temperature rise of a conductor due to the electric current. (1931). http://hdl.handle.net/2115/37682
PDF: https://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/3768...
1. Riba, J.-R.; Llauradó, J. A Model to Calculate the Current–Temperature Relationship of Insulated and Jacketed Cables. Materials (2022) 15,6814. https://doi.org/10.3390/ma15196814
PDF: https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/materials/materials-15-068...
It seems like we could get quite a bit of extra juice by changing to DC transmission.
Since HVDC has significant fixed costs, it's not relevant for shorter lines.
Clark Energy Center, New York Power Authority - Marcy, NY https://maps.app.goo.gl/hvQi4qzgSTbs84296
to another (HQT):
Hydro-Québec - Poste Châteauguay - Saint-Étienne-de-Beauharnois, QC https://maps.app.goo.gl/duDA5wbBPrgVBxc19
but, reporting of other attached lines stops there because the datasource doesn't include Canadian-only lines.
Live overview status here, but not for a specific power line: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
Still, peak usage year over year looks flat to my eyes.
I'm sure we can't keep time-shifting and efficiency engineering ourselves out of a fundamental need for more total energy for a huge % of EVs and the push to phase out natural gas, but it might do most of the work for us. All big power hogs are getting more efficient. Electric cars can charge "whenever", but I imagine a future where just spreading the EV load between 11pm and 6am is no longer enough. Plus, we need more energy storage or non-solar) sources to handle the fact that loads are going to increasingly move to the overnight hours.
https://www.caiso.com/documents/californiaisopeakloadhistory...
I know next to nothing about nuclear energy (or most other kinds of energy), but what I understand from what she told me is that one of its biggest hurdles is that it can't adjust up and down for demand very well. If you want to meet peak demand, you end up massively overproducing the rest of the time. If you have the batteries available, by all means, store it, but if you don't, bitcoin mining rigs can very easily be turned on and off in whatever numbers you need to balance out the demand, or at least smooth it out enough that the nuclear production can handle the remaining fluctuation.
It's a different problem, trying to match energy production that would prefer to be constant with demand that fluctuates, as opposed to trying to match fluctuating production with fluctuating demand, but I think of it almost like a "battery" that stores the "energy" as money rather than directly. Like, when the demand drops, earn whatever bitcoin you can with the miners so you can keep it cost effective to run nuclear and you're not having to turn to supplemental, higher cost, less clean energy sources in times of peak demand.
Interesting that people are doing this! When I was thinking about this ~10y ago [1] the economics didn't work out because of how quickly the ASICs depreciated, but they've probably stopped getting better quickly by now?
[1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/balancing-the-grid-with-bitcoin
This is a historic limitation. We have the technology to perform load follow with the legacy fleet. Most utilities just designed their fleets around the assumption that nuclear would be base load and therefore are less incentivized to operate their nuclear reactors this way.
Turning excess energy straight into heat is NOT doing something useful.
Install a boatload more storage. Set up desalinization plants. Get manufacturing to move to 3rd shift.
Anything other than Shitcoin.
Obv. not possible for renters or condo owners or for people who can install solar.
That can be as much as 67% or more of the households in large Metro areas. This is really why I think EV adoption is a pipe dream. It is probably a boon for the grid as well.
I only plug my car in - and with slow charging - when it is sunny such that my EV’s load basically never hits the grid.
Just because we're exploited and victimized by a parasite, doesn't make us one.
Where I work, they are used a lot to adjust for renewables power surges, not to increase transit.
The bit about automaticaly shifting power to other lines in a strained network is interesting, but I wonder how much security analysis is run to make sure it’s safe (or if it’s just an automation system working within bounds the operator deemed safe).
But reconductoring seems like it buys you a lot of extra capacity over the existing physical right of way, and if you use advanced conductors you don’t even have to replace the towers if they’re in good condition. Yes, you have to replace a lot of equipment at substations, but my understanding is that while there is a shortage of some of this physical equipment, getting permits for new transmission lines is a far harder problem.
Which is cheaper, a peaker plant after the transmission line hitting peak capacity, or increased transmission line capacity for a small percentage of the time?
Now it's just battery storage instead of natural gas peaker plants. You can still smooth out the transmission line capacity with downstream storage.
Or have we already done that to the max with peaker plants and now transmission lines are running at their capacity 90% of the time? I haven't read the numbers in a while, it used to be really bad!
But on the other hand, reasonable grid planning is done a decade ahead, more for some equipment. Money spent in a hurry is likely to be wasted in that business.
Storage to optimize grid (not production) cost is neither efficient nor resilient as far as I know.
Also having a peaker plant solves production peaks, not transmission limits. And nobody builds a second peaker at the other end of a line to save on grid costs. Redispatching is a thing, but it is a small optimization, not a solution to an underdeveloped grid.
I assume With that many buffer in place the whole thing should be able to self balance relatively easily. But I wonder if that is also a false assumption.
https://www.2035report.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GridLa...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/transmission/the-us-is-...
Modern conductors can transmit significantly more energy by better conductor design, so replacing ancient conductors is a relatively cheap way to increase transmission capacity while also reducing line sag which makes the transmission lines safer.
I know there's a lot of blockers, but if there's money to be made I would have thought more people would have worked around them.
US infrastructure overall is in need of a “jolt” (updating).
Bridges, highways, power grid and more are all aging and in need of massive updating / refresh.
"Yes, Senator, upgrading the covered wooden bridge to Sleepy Hollow is essential. It cannot presently bear the weight of a column of M1 Abrams tanks, such as would be required to defend the nation from invasion. Let it not be said you are weak on defence, Senator!" /s
I mean, the federal government funded the Interstate Highway System largely to be able to get troops from one end of the country to the other, now someone just needs to make a similar case for bridges and high-speed rail.
As per the third paragraph of the article: "In New York, Algonquin Power won a $42.9 million grant to install devices that automatically redeploy power when lines are overloaded. Virginia’s Dominion Energy won $33.7 million for a project that includes devices that will let it adjust power distribution in response to changing conditions on the grid. The funds are part of a $3.5 billion program for grid-boosting projects the Energy Department rolled out in October."
To save you a few clicks, that program is funded by the bill in question, as per https://www.energy.gov/gdo/grid-resilience-and-innovation-pa...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-aging-u-s-power-...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/BB1nJZ92
The US really need to legalize transmission line construction!
If we had smarter systems to plan and route power transfers, we could get the network to move far far more power
Most of that overcapacity is in little local wiring, like the cables to your street, where there is likely nothing smart at all right now.
(Transmission lines have losses, these heat up the wires. If they get too hot, they droop too much. So they have a maximum power rating. Dynamic rating takes weather effects into account to vary that maximum.)
Meanwhile in China: thousands of km long megavolt UHVDC transmission lines. https://www.hitachienergy.com/about-us/customer-success-stor...
High conductivity, less transmission loss. Potentially fewer towers (because you can space them out a little further), offsetting the cost of the wires. Neat!
[0] https://www.volts.wtf/p/one-easy-way-to-boost-the-grid-upgra...
Outside China, companies and governments usually have to be careful when making investments. They can't decide to start building transmission lines/housing/fast train lines/deploy 5G everywhere and spend huge amounts of money if the return is small/non existent... And so usually things are only built or improved when there's a demand for it.
China can make a 5 year plan to build UHVDC everywhere and the grid operator won't go under no matter what. This has been working for them so far (even though it creates some serious problems) and certainly gives them an advantage, but you can't do that in most places.
It works in the wake of a decimated economy. War. Natural disaster. Cultural revolution. There is so much slack in the system virtually anything will be put to productive use.
In that state, you can build a road to nowhere and people will put it to use, not because it’s a well-placed road, but because it’s the only road in the vicinity.
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/united-s...
This can be understood intuitively: air conditioning is used when it’s 85° outside to make it 70° inside. Heating is regularly used to make it 65° inside when it is 20° outside. It turns out fossil fuels contain a truly remarkable amount of energy that happens to be really easy to release into a living space.
Until that happens, EVs will never be useful enough to make ICE cars obsolete.
"It's the infrastructure, stupid".
The US and other countries should have spent those trillions on infrastructure instead of wasting lives and treasure on stupid military adventures. Too late now, the countries are going down the gurgler big time.
For some rough math, people drive 10 billion miles per day in the US, and at 3-4 miles per kWh that's an average of 105-140 gigawatts. Average production is half a terawatt, so replacing half the cars on the road might only need 10% more average power production, and almost all of that charging can be done off-peak without an impact on transmission.
In the optimistic case, electric cars can even reduce peak loads on big distribution lines.
Okay, but what do you do when the wind isn't blowing? How do you get people to only charge their cars when it's windy?
- Large grid to decouple weather patterns
- Demand response
- Storage
People already get on hourly contracts and schedule car charging for when it is cheap. The next step is automating it and making it more streamlined.
Some companies already support chargers which integrate with the pricing, they can even give you money back through demand response.
https://support.tibber.com/en/articles/5597987-smart-chargin...
My electrical provider gave me a good discount on my fixed rate plan by letting them micromanage the charging times of my car. I tell them I need it X% charged by some time in the morning, and they'll make sure it's at that charge by that time.
If I really need to charge it right away I can still just do that, but the vast majority of the time I don't need to think about it. My car sits in the garage for many hours, there's plenty of time to optimize the charge timings.
Chances are they even pick up a lot of time where spot prices go negative, so they're making money selling it to me and buying it from the grid.
Market prices and "smart" chargers
Am I missing something? A <sarcasm> tag maybe?
On a more serious note on how to get people to change their electricity use there is a real solution in flexible (hourly) pricing. This is what we have where I live - Sweden - and it can be a way to lower electricity bills quite a bit [1] by moving power hogs like water heaters, tumble driers and car chargers to the lowest-priced times of day. If you have solar panels and a contract which enables you to sell excess power at market rates (like we do) you can decide to feed their output into the net when prices are at their peak - usually around noon and somewhere between 17.00 and 21.00 (when it is still quite light in much of Sweden given that we straddle the polar circle) - while using most of it for power hogs off-peak.
[1] on the assumption that flexible pricing is controlled by supply and demand, not by some policy-enforcing surcharge. Electricity prices need to be able to go lower as well as higher than 'normal', not just normal or higher.
And that may only be 1% of the time.
So monitoring may increase the load you can carry the vast majority of the time.
If you assume that EV charging is the marginal load which would put you over the windless capacity, but not the windy capacity, then in order to prevent overload you'd need to prevent EV charging when there is no wind and therefore the transmission capacity is lower.
Taking a step back it's a general problem with this type of optimization, what to do when the system has become accustomed to, and is designed for, capacity which isn't available. How do you get people to use less power in order to avoid a blackout?
