The U.S. is falling behind China in high voltage transmission Image By Rob Gramlich This is a lightly edited excerpt of testimony recently provided to the U.S. Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee during the hearing “Hearing to Identify Challenges to Meeting Increased Electricity Demand.” The transmission grid is the great integrator of all resources. While it may seem like transmission expansion is needed just for renewable energy, that is just because wind, solar and battery projects made up almost all of the requests to connect to the grid over the last five years. Today, new large loads and natural gas plants are trying to connect, and they are experiencing the same slow and complicated interconnection process that results from limited capacity. Soon we may see nuclear, advanced geothermal, hydro, thermal and other resources connect, and the constraints will affect them as well. Regardless of one’s preference for generation type, one should support development of a much less constrained high voltage transmission grid. Achieving ‘economies of scale’ High-voltage transmission investment is a great deal for consumers because it costs one-fourth as much to build high voltage (e.g., 765 kV) as it does to build lower voltage (e.g., 230 kV) lines. This economic phenomenon of “economies of scale” has always been and remains present in some parts of the electric industry but especially the transmission sector (in contrast to generation where bigger is not necessarily lower cost). Investment in well planned, high-capacity transmission could save residential consumers $6.3 billion to $10.4 billion per year across the United States after accounting for the cost of the transmission. Presently across many utilities and states, we are doing transmission in the most expensive way possible – reactive, incremental and small. Shifting to proactive, multi-purpose, and large investments would achieve more and cost less. Transmission expansion can be fast and help meet loads in the 2020s. While some lines will still take over 5 years to plan, permit and build even with permitting and regulatory reforms, many types of transmission plans can increase capacity quickly. Approximately 90% of the first tranche of MISO Long Range Transmission Plans were upgrades of capacity over existing rights of way. High-performance conductors and grid-enhancing technologies can squeeze delivery capacity out of the existing network quickly and very affordably. The sooner grid planners proactively plan for future load and generation, the sooner capacity can be expanded. Boosting reliability and resilience Transmission supports reliability and resilience more than any other option. Transmission lines typically have at least 99.85% availability across all voltage levels, far higher than any individual generation source. Transmission networks are multi-directional; once built, they serve many needs that one could not have predicted ahead of time, moving power from where it exists to where it is needed, and doing so automatically and at the speed of light. With severe weather events in recent years, sometimes 10% of a region’s needs are met by large scale movements of power across major regions of the country. That is why interregional transmission is so important and was the focus of a Congressional requirement for the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to study the need. NERC’s report found a need for 35 GW of increased interregional transmission capacity. Interstate efforts require federal leadership Federal regulatory policy is needed because the current U.S. policy and legacy industry structure are not well-suited for large-scale long-distance transmission. The 3,000 transmission-owning utilities have well-established processes for investing in their local systems. But it has been requiring policies such as bipartisan FERC Orders 2000 (in 1999), 890 (in 2007), 1000 (in 2011), and 1920 (in 2024) to enable planning for the larger regional investments that matter so much for reliability and customers’ bills. The U.S. is falling far behind global competitors. China built 80 times more high voltage transmission than the US in the second half of the 2010s. In the 2020s, China has completed more than 8,200 miles of ultra-high voltage lines while the U.S. has built only 375 miles. European utilities are rapidly increasing the minimum transfer capacity between countries to move power back and forth. Over 125,000 miles of high-performance conductors have been installed in India, Europe and China. The U.S. has installed less than 10 percent of that. Read the full testimony here. Rob Gramlich is the President of Grid Strategies. *The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of EnergyPlatform.News.
