The US electrical grid began construction in the early 1900s. It is commonly referred to as the largest machine in the world. The grid transports electricity across thousands of miles of high voltage wires each time someone flips a light switch or turns on their air conditioning unit. Like most things we take for granted, it’s beauty and complexity often goes unnoticed and underappreciated. As we push towards a greener, more sustainable future, more of our lives will become dependent on the grid. We will need to charge our electric vehicles, power our expanding data centers, and keep the servers of our growing ecommerce markets online. A study from the NREL estimated that US energy consumption will increase by about 40% by 2050, driven largely by the electrification of transportation. Not only is this increase something that our grid isn’t prepared to handle, but it will also directly affect our goals of becoming a net-zero carbon emissions nation by 2050 as shown in the chart below from a study done by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). As we move into a world dependent on electricity, it’s crucial that we’re prepared with the proper infrastructure to sustain our electrification goals. Otherwise, we may soon find ourselves sitting in the dark, wondering where things went wrong.
There are two major issues with our current electrical grid. The first is it’s age. A majority of our transmission lines and generators were constructed between the 1950s and 1970s. These lines were expected to last about fifty years. Despite maintenance efforts, as different sections of the grid begin to reach their life expectancy, they’re naturally beginning to malfunction. A report from Climate Central found that major outages have become 10x more likely since the early 1980s.
The effects of these outages can be catastrophic. When the Texas electrical grid went down this past February, it left 4.5 million homes and businesses stranded without power for two weeks, unable to heat their homes in the midst of a winter snow storm. As we begin to lean more heavily into electrification of our technologies, the severity of such outages will only worsen. We need to be better prepared for such situations for both the safety of our communities and the stability of our economy.
The second issue with our current electrical grid is that it doesn’t support renewable energy generation well. Our grid was built with centralized utilities in mind. They generate and supply consistent power throughout the day. Renewable energy like solar and wind produce variable voltages based on the amount of sunlight or wind present at a given time. The grid as it’s currently constructed cannot solely rely on time-varying sources of electricity. Instead, we need to use non-renewable sources of electricity like coal and natural gas to form the base of our electricity consumption and simply use renewable energies to supplement our electricity supply. For us to truly reach our goals of 95% renewable energy usage by 2050, we need to incorporate energy storage systems into the grid. This would allow us to store solar and wind energy when it’s sunny or windy outside, and use this energy later on when it’s cloudy or the air is still.
Now that we’ve established the issues with our current grid, we should discuss viable solutions to fixing them. This is a complex topic that requires considering multiple, evolving possibilities. Two long term infrastructure changes we can make are a transition to a decentralized grid and the undergrounding of our transmission lines. Both of these changes will be costly and have significant roadblocks, but beginning work on them immediately is important to the future of our transition to electricity.
A common reason for outages is the breaking of transmission wires, whether it be from a tree falling, high winds, or abnormal wind chill. As weather patterns become more difficult to predict due to climate change, these occurrences are becoming more common. To avoid wires being at the mercy of the elements, we can bury them underground the same way we buried our natural gas pipelines. Undergrounding wires can be expensive though. Burying a mile of transmission lines is estimated to cost a million dollars on average. To determine if this transition is cost effective, we can compare the cost of undergrounding an area’s transmission lines to the economic losses of that town losing electricity. A FEMA case study found that for large cities, losing power for just a few hours can cost millions of dollars. In these cases, it makes economic sense to start the transition to underground wires. Though, in rural areas,where there are fewer loads on the grid, the economic consequences of temporarily losing power are far less severe. We’ve seen a slow transition towards underground wires as lines begin to break. Undergrounded wires still form a tiny fraction of the total US electric grid. If we want to make a tangible difference to the resilience of our grid to extreme climate conditions, we need to accelerate this change. We need more incentives for both rural and urban transmission lines to be buried underground. After all, a few broken electric lines in the midwest can lead to a power outage in New York in a few minutes. Our grid is a single, mammoth machine, and we need to work that it has no vulnerabilities, whether it’s in rural Wyoming or Manhattan.
A more complex idea is the concept of a decentralized grid. The construction of a decentralized grid will allow our cities and communities to stay powered despite malfunctions in certain sections of the grid. Our grid was constructed with a centralized design in mind, where utilities would serve as energy suppliers, and they’d supply power to every device on the grid. The issue is that when a transmission wire breaks or a utility can no longer generate electricity, all of the loads connected to the grid lose power. Ideally, these loads would still have some means of staying powered even when disconnected from a central power plant. For this to happen, the load would need a source of backup power generation and a backup battery that it can pull energy from. We would also want some system that could communicate to the larger powergrid that there is a dip in voltage and that it needs to disconnect from the main grid to maintain the functionality of its devices. These three elements form the basis of a microgrid – a group of loads that are connected to a larger power grid but can be islanded to function on their own when necessary. A microgrid also allows loads to disconnect from the grid when energy on the grid may be more expensive than the energy the microgrid can produce itself. This allows for better energy prices for microgrid users and peak loads to be more distributed on the larger grid. Microgrids can be made up of the loads of all the devices in a single home or the combined loads of the homes in a small community. For larger groups like university campuses or data centers, there are more complex systems called smart grids that function with a similar concept in mind.
Another benefit of a decentralized grid is that it would allow renewable energy sources to be incorporated into the grid more easily. Rather than having the majority of power come from a select group of coal and natural gas plants across the nation, a decentralized design would make it possible for solar farms, wind turbines, and smaller renewable energy generators in peoples homes and communities across the country to send energy to the grid. With the United States’s ambitious goals to reach 95% renewable energy in the next few decades, a decentralized grid is not just an idea but a necessity.
We need to be proactive in developing electric infrastructure that will be able to not just meet our current energy demand but rather prepare for our growing energy needs. We need a grid that will motivate the electrification of our world. If we don’t begin building our new base of infrastructure, we will limit the potential for our transition to electric vehicles, sustainable energy, and carbon neutral businesses. This will have long term economic and environmental consequences. I believe we will see an explosion of new, innovative grid technologies over the next decade, and I’m excited to learn about and explore the grid for both its beautiful complexity and the challenges it presents.
Sources:
Transmission Line Data: https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=70512b03fe994c6393107cc9946e5c22#visualize
Energy Usage Projections: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/06/us-eia-projections-on-energy-usage-and-carbon-emissions-in-2050.html
Energy Information Administration Reports: https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/releases/press487.php
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/energy-and-the-environment/outlook-for-future-emissions.php
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