The Department of Energy issued a planning road map Thursday for a major expansion of the nation’s high-voltage power grid aimed at moving far more renewable energy to population centers and meeting 2035 climate goals.
The long-awaited National Transmission Planning Study arrives with little more than a month left in the 2024 presidential campaign. Under a Democratic administration, if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election in November, the report is expected to guide efforts to build more long-distance power lines that can ship power across multiple states.
Plans for more interregional electricity lines are also touted by top Biden administration officials as a way to bring down the cost of electricity on congested lines and shore up and connect grids that face greater electric reliability risks from extreme weather.
“We think that it drives down rates [and] boosts resilience, especially with storms like Helene that are really turbocharged by climate change,” White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi said.
“We need a grid that helps neighbors help neighbors, and I think that’s what interregional transmission is about,” he added Wednesday.
With the election on the horizon, the 800-plus-page planning study is likely to disappear from view if a Republican administration under former President Donald Trump takes office. Trump himself and officials under the previous Trump administration have made it clear that federal programs designed to shift the electricity grid and industrial sector away from burning fossil fuels would be scratched.
The national transmission plan provides a series of scenarios for how the grid could be expanded and coordinated to achieve a 90 percent or greater reduction in power plant carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 2035. At the same time, the expansion is a trifecta of Biden administration policy goals: moving carbon-free energy, strengthening transmission grids against the accelerating risks to infrastructure posed by climate change, and minimizing costs for consumers by avoiding the need to build new power plants.
The Biden administration also used its final months to inject more money into four large transmission projects that have struggled to get under construction. DOE’s $1.5 billion in purchase commitments go to the Aroostook Renewable Gateway project in Maine, the Cimarron Link in Oklahoma, the Southern Spirit line connecting Texas and Mississippi and the Southline project in New Mexico.
Southern Spirit would be the first large transmission connection to Texas from the rest of the eastern U.S. grid, able to aid the Lone Star State in a weather emergency.
The four competitively chosen projects would back nearly 1,000 miles of new lines creating 7,100 megawatts of transmission capacity.
Shaving risk
DOE under President Joe Biden has issued permitting approvals or announced financing support for more than 5,000 miles of new transmission lines. And the department has allocated nearly all of a $2.5 billion revolving fund authorized by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.
DOE will act as initial customers for the four power lines by purchasing electricity moving along the lines and selling it to utilities. The DOE power purchases will take on some of the investor risks in order to advance a national energy policy.
Power line projects have died on the vine in recent years because of local opposition and also because electricity companies operating in the regions where wind and solar power were being shipped to did not want the competition, grid analysts have noted.
DOE spokesperson Katie Weeks said the department’s market analysis pointed to strong demand for the additional transmission capacity.
DOE did not release cost projections for the grid build-out scenarios it analyzed but said every dollar spent on the new transmission networks would cut costs of grid operations by $1.60 to $1.80.
DOE and other analysts estimate the U.S grid will have to double or triple in capacity by 2050 to meet a net-zero economywide target for carbon emissions and to keep up with accelerating power needs from new technologies.
The most ambitious of the plans would crisscross the Lower 48 states with new high-voltage direct current lines connecting wind and solar energy in the central U.S. with population centers in the Midwest, Eastern Seaboard and Southeast.
They would be engineered to route power in both directions, increasing their importance in major grid outages. One line system would stretch from the upper Great Plains to eastern Great Lakes states. Another, with multiple offshoots, would connect central Midwest wind and solar farms to the Chicago area. A third would carry Oklahoma and Texas energy to Florida.
DOE said the transmission plan, containing an unprecedented level of computer analysis from the department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory, should be a foundation for a study of where interregional transmission networks are most needed, now underway at the North American Electric Reliability Corp.
And it could be a resource at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has issued requirements for regional transmission planning and is considering new rules for interregional connections.
The hard part: Getting lines built
The vision articulated by DOE is already meeting its real-world test in the Midwest where the region’s grid operator, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, is poised to approve 4,000 miles of new high-voltage “backbone” transmission later this year.
The proposed portfolio of lines is the second in three years and part of a $100 billion multiphase plan across all of MISO that would take two decades to realize even if everything goes smoothly.
The current $21 billion package of projects covering nine states is to go to a vote of MISO’s board in December and is expected to deliver the same types of benefits outlined by Biden administration officials in a press call Wednesday: lower energy costs, cut greenhouse gas emissions and develop a more resilient grid better able to withstand extreme weather.
But history has proven that transforming lines on a map into towers and high-voltage wires isn’t easily or quickly accomplished.
Even in a best-case scenario, any projects approved by MISO later this year would take another decade to put into service, even absent the kind of challenges that confronted projects like Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission line, a 100-mile power line through Iowa and Wisconsin approved by MISO in 2011.
That project, also meant to accommodate the expansion of renewable energy, was just placed into service last month amid years of legal wrangling over the project’s path through the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge.
Still another transmission project through the Midwest, the 780-mile Grain Belt Express transmission line, was proposed the same year that Cardinal-Hickory Creek was approved by MISO and work on the line has yet to begin.