Say you want to build a wind farm. You find a beautiful vacant lot in northern Vermont where the winds blow evenly and the neighbors don’t complain about the bleak views. (ONE criticize miraclein other words.) You arrange investors, get the right permits, and prepare to install your turbines. Then you hit snag: powerline. Not enough in rural Vermont; they’re all in Boston, with their people and Teslas. So you’ve got a problem. The wind is blowing here, but there is no way to get its green energy over there.
Since 1889, when the United States had its first long-distance power line (it traverses a whopping 14 miles), much of the grid has been established for energy consumption relatively close to where it is produced. There are exceptions – like hydroelectricity to cities from distant dams – but for the most part, there has been a century of linking coal and gas plants to people living nearby. But now, with wind farms dotting the ridges and solar power plants dotted in the desert, distances are becoming more common.
The strings are not ready for it. Researchers at Princeton University estimate that the country’s high-voltage transmission capacity need to increase 60 percent over the next decade to meet clean energy goals. “The grid we haven’t designed for what we do with it now, let alone what we want,” said Seth Blumsack, a power grid economist at Penn State University. do with it, with all kinds of renewable energy.”
Kerinia Cusick, co-founder of the Center for Integration of Renewable Energy, a non-profit that advocates modernizing the grid for green energy, explains in many parts of the country wind and solar have been the Cheapest ways to produce energy. That means that in places like rural Vermont, wind farm owners are often ordered to close when a fresh breeze is blowing — a move known as “short cut” — because too much electricity is running. through the conductor.
For plants that have not yet been built, the situation is even worse, because grid constraints mean that backers have to string together new lines and pay for them, before installing them. place the turbines or solar panels. Each year, hundreds of renewable energy projects stall in advanced planning stages due to delays in transmission line upgrades and the cost of implementing those upgrades.
“There is a very real danger of killing your project,” said Hudson Gilmer, chief executive officer of LineVision. Gilmer’s company attacks the problem from a different angle: making now available grid carries more electricity. Even if plans for a new route are approved, there is no guarantee that it will actually happen. No one wants giant power lines strung across their backyard or across an endangered wetland. So Gilmer is looking for ways to save electricity on lines where congestion is a big problem.
That can happen because power lines are often underutilized. Limits on the amount of electricity that lines can carry are often set in advance, and they are based on physical and engineering assumptions that were made decades ago. They’re conservative — understandably so, in the interest of keeping the lights running reliably and safely. But Gilmer and others argue that technological improvements allow chain owners to more closely monitor their systems and leverage more power. “We’re not suggesting that we don’t need high-voltage power lines to bring renewable energy from the Dakotas or West Texas to urban areas,” Gilmer said, referring to the two manufacturing areas. The nation’s largest wind power plant. So the country still needs new electronic superhighways. However, the idea is to break out of congested lines and make room for more renewables waiting in the queue.
LineVision specializes in a technique known as dynamic flow assessment. One of the physical limitations of power lines is the heat they generate when an electric current is passed through them. Too much power and the line will begin to sag as the wire heats and expands, potentially sparking and causing a fire. But no one is really monitoring each line. The limits are based on assumptions intended to avoid the worst case scenario. There are other factors that affect the temperature of the line – for example, the weather. Most days there’s a slight breeze blowing through the wires and it cools them down — maybe by just a few degrees, but theoretically enough to carry more energy. So Gilmer’s company installed sensors that monitor line deflections using lidar and other devices. It claims the technology can increase a line’s capacity by up to 40%.
