Outdated infrastructure is making America’s electricity grid vulnerable to blackouts in the face of climate change and an ambitious clean energy transition, experts say.
While huge regions of the U.S. have not experienced rolling blackouts caused by high energy demand this year despite earlier predictions, “the system remains vulnerable to extreme weather events,” warns the Great Plains Institute (GPI).
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“Given the serious health and economic impacts of blackouts, it’s crucial to understand what’s driving the risk and how we can build a more reliable and resilient grid.”
To get to the heart of the issue, GPI experts Brian Ross, vice president, renewable energy, and Matt Prorok, senior policy manager, energy systems, took part in a roundtable discussion with managing editor Jennifer Christensen to discuss the cause of reliability issues and what’s blocking available solutions, in the Midwestern U.S. The discussion yielded five main takeaways:
States must invest in infrastructure to deliver clean electricity where it’s needed and meet changing demand patterns if they’re to build a resilient, reliable, affordable system.
The rapidly falling costs of renewable energy generation creates growing demand for power sources like wind, solar, and hydropower that is outstripping the grid’s transmission capacity. New clean energy projects are being held back by insufficient transmission capacity to handle the new generation.
That’s partly because new infrastructure is developed slowly compared to the rate at which the market is expanding. Infrastructure typically is not built in preparation for future demand because it can drive up power bills until demand catches up with the new capacity.
But when transmission capacity finally catches up with the supplies available today, the wider distribution of clean energy power sources will create a grid that is more reliable and resilient against blackouts.
“The grid of the future will be inherently more disbursed. Generation will not be located as close to load centres, and the average size of a power plant will be smaller (think a 100-MW wind farm vs. a 1000-MW coal plant),” Prorok said. “Transmission connects it all together to keep electrons flowing to people’s homes and businesses.”
The U.S. grid’s aging infrastructure limits the amount of new generation that can come online.
A significant portion of the U.S. grid uses aging infrastructure, with some parts of the country relying on 100-year-old transmission lines. These outdated lines and other grid assets prevent new power generation from coming online.
The grid also relies on wholesale power markets to coordinate and distribute energy from multiple sources, but rising demand for new power sources stresses this system, as well.
“Demand and supply need the connecting infrastructure,” Prorock said. “If it’s not there, we end up with demand that can’t be met with the existing system.”
Aging, uneconomic power plants will continue to retire as the market demands cheaper, cleaner electricity.
Coal and nuclear power plants are closing as they become increasingly expensive compared to clean energy sources. In stories about grid reliability, the closure of coal and nuclear plants is often described as premature—but those closures are being driven by market forces.
“Wind and solar are the least expensive ways to generate energy,” Ross said. “If we can build and operate new wind energy plants at a lower cost than running existing coal plants, that’s not ‘early’ retirement. That’s letting market forces work.”
While clean energy sources are ready to come online, market barriers stand in the way of adding enough capacity as aging power plants retire.
One major barrier to developing new infrastructure is that up-front costs won’t pay off for many years—a scenario that tends to repel investors.
Shifting the sources of electricity production will also mean shifting many of the market structures surrounding energy production. For instance, the current practice of saddling interconnection customers with costs for upgrading facilities has caused many new projects to drop out of the queue as those costs rise. Regulatory systems can also hinder new projects—like battery storage systems—if market rules are unsuited to accommodate the new technologies.
New projects may also face community resistance if residents are unwilling to risk losses of property value or threats to nearby natural resources.
Climate-driven weather extremes coupled with changing demand patterns will strain existing systems and power plants.
As the grid shifts to new power sources while still struggling with poor transmission capacities, “we have increasing climate-driven weather volatility, heat, and humidity, which have many impacts,” said Ross.
“These affect the demand side of the equation (increasing demand for cooling and dehumidification),” he explained. “They also affect the supply side (increasing the unreliability of power generation and greater risks to transmission and distribution systems).”
