Today, we walk step-by-step through the process of how high-voltage power lines are planned, financed, permitted, & sited, show how it's f'd up, and show how to fix it.
Honest Q: where are unions on some of this stuff? I know we're always waiting on "infrastructure week", but curious to know if IBEW and others are keen to push this in "non-climate" bills. I imagine they're super gung ho, but I feel like I get the politics of this stuff wrong with some regularity.
David, in all the years I've been reading you I don't think you've ever written something so specifically targeted to my experiences. It's been a while since I worked in grid management, but much of what you've written here is basically what we were saying a decade ago. All I would add is that the political and financial incentive problems you identify here are in fact much worse than they appear from the outside. Most of the technical issues can be traced directly to some competing motivation. For example, it's not exactly true that multi-year forecasting is impossible: it's a fairly routine exercise in planning. What is true is that these recommendations are rarely incorporated into actual expansion because they don't always align with the relevant business incentives.
late to the party but one thought and one question:
I think one of the most important points above is that "shift away from regional projects ... to smaller or supposedly time-sensitive projects that IOUs build with little oversight and without competitive pressures”. Based on experiences on NEPOOL committees here in New England, it seems like the transmission operators/owners decided overnight to stop trying to build big projects and to only start suggesting projects that were directly under the budget cap, which at the time I remember as being $2 million dollars. Want to build one $200mm project? Well that'll take several years of studies and plans and committee meetings. Want to build 100 $1.99mm projects? Go right ahead!
Also: through all of the question of how to build more/site more transmission, where do non-wires alternatives come into play? Surely there's a role for NWAs to play to alleviate the need to build quite as much quite as fast in quite as many places?
Cuteness break was key. Your niece did an excellent job on that picture. Also, how did you get electrical tower to jump like that? Very impressive.
I work in regulatory affairs for the NYC Office of Sustainability. The City has been very public about the need for additional transmission into NYC if we're going to meet our renewables goals. Hoping the Biden Administration will jump all over these ideas.
Next stop--the Ari Peskoe paper. Then gotta think through how all of this might influence our federal advocacy positions. Thanks for giving me so much material to work with!
Great post. A few questions or suggestions. First, I think it would be helpful to better understand why/how natural gas transmission buildouts have been so successful -- what is it about natty gas that people love so much? Fatima Ahmad (I think) is basically saying you only want to use the same authority the gas industry has as a last resort? Is this the way the natural gas transmission projects work in practice (the last resort authority is used sparingly) and are they able to get a lot of local support or is there some other secret sauce the gas guys use? Maybe the "big stick" of eminent domain opens a lot of doors...
Second -- didn't the Obama administration try a lot of this stuff with National Transmission Corridors of Interest and most (maybe all) of them failed? I know that Cascade Crossing was picked as a high profile priority project and still didn't get built. Moreover, staying in the NW, BPA has been unsuccessful at building transmission I believe largely because of land-use issues, mostly on ecologically important federal land. Is there a solution here or can we sometimes say that actually, we need to look outside of transmission for the solution? Is giving the PMAs more power that helpful?
Last but not least, what were the political conditions that enabled the gas industry to move past the typical "state vs. federal" issues with giving gas the authority? Was that the 70s energy crisis and the need to move past oil-fired power plants fast? Not only are most Rs not particularly fond of clean energy, they're especially fond of prioritising state rights over federal rights, and so asking Congress to move on this becomes a state rights issue as much as a climate issue, which also makes this tough...
This is why I subscribe! I am in the electricity industry, but I never understood the nuts and bolts about why building transmission was so hard until now. (I knew “NIMBYs have incredible power to block anything” but not the vast difference in federal law governing gas pipelines, for example!) Thanks!
As long as we're talking about ISOs, RTO's, etc. some may be interested to know that EPA publishes emissions data for each of the regions and subregions. If you want to understand their emissions, take a look at the Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database (eGRID) at https://www.epa.gov/egrid
Honest Q: where are unions on some of this stuff? I know we're always waiting on "infrastructure week", but curious to know if IBEW and others are keen to push this in "non-climate" bills. I imagine they're super gung ho, but I feel like I get the politics of this stuff wrong with some regularity.
David, in all the years I've been reading you I don't think you've ever written something so specifically targeted to my experiences. It's been a while since I worked in grid management, but much of what you've written here is basically what we were saying a decade ago. All I would add is that the political and financial incentive problems you identify here are in fact much worse than they appear from the outside. Most of the technical issues can be traced directly to some competing motivation. For example, it's not exactly true that multi-year forecasting is impossible: it's a fairly routine exercise in planning. What is true is that these recommendations are rarely incorporated into actual expansion because they don't always align with the relevant business incentives.
late to the party but one thought and one question:
I think one of the most important points above is that "shift away from regional projects ... to smaller or supposedly time-sensitive projects that IOUs build with little oversight and without competitive pressures”. Based on experiences on NEPOOL committees here in New England, it seems like the transmission operators/owners decided overnight to stop trying to build big projects and to only start suggesting projects that were directly under the budget cap, which at the time I remember as being $2 million dollars. Want to build one $200mm project? Well that'll take several years of studies and plans and committee meetings. Want to build 100 $1.99mm projects? Go right ahead!
Also: through all of the question of how to build more/site more transmission, where do non-wires alternatives come into play? Surely there's a role for NWAs to play to alleviate the need to build quite as much quite as fast in quite as many places?
Cuteness break was key. Your niece did an excellent job on that picture. Also, how did you get electrical tower to jump like that? Very impressive.
I work in regulatory affairs for the NYC Office of Sustainability. The City has been very public about the need for additional transmission into NYC if we're going to meet our renewables goals. Hoping the Biden Administration will jump all over these ideas.
Next stop--the Ari Peskoe paper. Then gotta think through how all of this might influence our federal advocacy positions. Thanks for giving me so much material to work with!
Great post. A few questions or suggestions. First, I think it would be helpful to better understand why/how natural gas transmission buildouts have been so successful -- what is it about natty gas that people love so much? Fatima Ahmad (I think) is basically saying you only want to use the same authority the gas industry has as a last resort? Is this the way the natural gas transmission projects work in practice (the last resort authority is used sparingly) and are they able to get a lot of local support or is there some other secret sauce the gas guys use? Maybe the "big stick" of eminent domain opens a lot of doors...
Second -- didn't the Obama administration try a lot of this stuff with National Transmission Corridors of Interest and most (maybe all) of them failed? I know that Cascade Crossing was picked as a high profile priority project and still didn't get built. Moreover, staying in the NW, BPA has been unsuccessful at building transmission I believe largely because of land-use issues, mostly on ecologically important federal land. Is there a solution here or can we sometimes say that actually, we need to look outside of transmission for the solution? Is giving the PMAs more power that helpful?
Last but not least, what were the political conditions that enabled the gas industry to move past the typical "state vs. federal" issues with giving gas the authority? Was that the 70s energy crisis and the need to move past oil-fired power plants fast? Not only are most Rs not particularly fond of clean energy, they're especially fond of prioritising state rights over federal rights, and so asking Congress to move on this becomes a state rights issue as much as a climate issue, which also makes this tough...
This is why I subscribe! I am in the electricity industry, but I never understood the nuts and bolts about why building transmission was so hard until now. (I knew “NIMBYs have incredible power to block anything” but not the vast difference in federal law governing gas pipelines, for example!) Thanks!
As long as we're talking about ISOs, RTO's, etc. some may be interested to know that EPA publishes emissions data for each of the regions and subregions. If you want to understand their emissions, take a look at the Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database (eGRID) at https://www.epa.gov/egrid
The most recent summary files (.pdf or .xls) are available at: https://www.epa.gov/egrid/summary-data
Detailed data files, with data for each generator, state, etc. are also available.
This is damn good stuff. Thanks, David!