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Any effective plan to combat climate change depends on a fundamental technology: tall wires are strung on tall towers.

The US needs to add hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission lines over the coming decades to bring its fragmented regional power systems together into an interconnected grid that can support a large flow of renewable energy.

A national network of short lines and long-distance, high-voltage wires will deliver wind, solar and hydro power where it’s needed when available across the country. It can help provide reliable backup power when heat waves or winter storms cause regional power outages, and can keep up with increasing demands as homes and businesses increasingly rely on electricity to power their vehicles, heat and more.

A grand vision with a few serious flaws: To begin with, it could cost hundreds of billions of dollars to build the necessary power lines in this decade alone. A Princeton-led to work It found that the United States would receive another $350 billion to develop needed transmission capacity over the next nine years alone. This is under a scenario where wind and solar power will provide half of the country’s electricity by 2030, putting the country on a path to zero emissions by the middle of the century.

Even as the government and businesses release the necessary funds, there is an even more pressing challenge ahead: states, counties, cities and towns across the country will need to quickly sign off on large numbers of new transmission lines. And the US has become terrible at allowing such multi-state projects.

A a series of efforts cheap, clean delivery hydro power from canada, Wind from the Great Plains and a mix of renewable energies southwest They have been steeped in legal battles for years or have been rejected, often due to the resistance of a single region to the wires that cut through its territory. Even these large grid projects being built can easily take ten years to complete the approval process.

Finally some help may be on the way. roughly $1 trillion infrastructure package Moving forward in the bipartisan Senate provides billions of dollars for transmission lines. It also includes some provisions that may be even more important than money, by strengthening and clarifying federal powers over project approvals.

However, the package will only represent a small upfront payment for the investments and permit changes that will be required.

‘To stay behind’

The US does not have a single network. There are three aging, disconnected systems, built largely in the middle of the last century, with limited capabilities for exchanging electricity between states and larger territories. This is a problem because power plants can be hundreds of miles away from major cities where the demand for electricity is greatest.

Isolated grids mean that electricity from fluctuating sources such as solar and wind can only be shipped so far, some of the output can be wasted, and prices drop when generation exceeds regional demands, especially during windy and sunny periods (which happens more and more each day). the share of these resources is growing). California, for example, can’t send excess solar power to the Midwest on a midsummer day, or draw steady wind power from Oklahoma, for example, when the sun begins to set on the West Coast.

But Doug Arent, executive director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, notes that operators of an integrated grid can deliver it to high-demand locations using the lowest-cost electricity available over a much wider area. This includes where renewable sources are consuming electricity at that time. wind in Wyoming or solar power in Florida.

Long-distance, high-voltage transmission lines also provide developers with larger customer bases in cities, enabling further development of solar, wind, hydro and geothermal power plants in regions blessed with air, geology or waterways to supply them. zone or two away.

Soon Lawrence Berkeley lab presentation He noted that more than 750 gigawatts of electricity generation offers were queuing in five U.S. regions, and he was waiting for transmission links that could deliver electricity to customers. The vast majority of these are solar and wind projects. (By comparison, the entire US fleet large-scale plants can generate a little more than 1100 gigawatts.)

Other countries are advancing rapidly on the field. Chinese appeared As the world’s clear leader in high voltage transmission, it builds tens of thousands of miles of these lines to connect power plants to cities across the country. But while China developed 260 gigawatts of transmission capacity between 2014 and 2021, all of North America added just seven. questionnaire Conducted by Iowa State University.

“The United States is lagging behind, but it has every reason to keep up,” said James McCalley, professor of power systems engineering at Iowa State University and co-author of a book. national grid work said in a statement released last year.

some of what you need

So how can the US start to close this gap?

First, he will need more money. While the Biden administration boasts that the infrastructure package provides $73 billion for “clean energy delivery,” these funds are spread across a wide range of clean energy efforts, including research and development and demonstration projects in areas such as carbon capture and clean hydrogen.

Rob Gramlich, president of energy consulting firm Grid Strategies, states that the current version of the infrastructure package allocates between $10 billion and $12 billion just to erect transmission towers and cables.

That’s a small fraction of the amount the Princeton research finds the US will need to implement over the next nine years. Jesse Jenkins, co-author of the Princeton study and assistant professor at the university, says that although federal spending is designed to unlock private capital, the United States still needs to invest tens of billions more this decade to reach the necessary scales.

It also creates a $2.5 billion revolving credit program for projects, making the Ministry of Energy the first customer of the new transmission lines. This federal funding could help launch transmission projects that will be needed, but time-consuming before the developer puts customers on the line. Observers say this could alleviate the persistent chicken-and-egg problem between building more electricity generation and building the lines needed to transport it.

Eventually, the federal government could sell those rights online for clean power plants that need access to the lines.

Jenkins says it’s a promising policy tool that “needs just one more zero at the budget limit.”

permission permissions

While money is scarce, the proposed infrastructure bill addresses approval bottlenecks.

A longstanding challenge in many parts of the US is that electricity generation capacity and energy demands are growing faster than the transmission systems needed to support it. People and businesses want cheap, reliable electricity, but few adopt the necessary transmission towers and cabling – especially if they often provide electricity and economic benefits to remote areas. Often there is aesthetic, environmental, social justice and business competition critiques as well.

“If we’re going to meet our climate goals, we need to find ways to approve these major transmission projects, and we’ve historically struggled to do that,” said Lindsey Walter, deputy director of the Third Way climate and energy program. , a center-left think tank in Washington DC, in an email.

An energy law from 2005 sought to address these tensions. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) the ability to step up and sign projects that could ease transmission restrictions in certain areas called national electricity transmission corridors. But so far, the Department of Energy has identified only two such sites in the mid-Atlantic and Southern California.

Also, a federal appeals court ultimately limited FERC’s jurisdiction, however, has found that states or other jurisdictions have the right to sign projects if they suspend an application for more than one year. The court ruled that it did not have the ability to override state rejection of applications under the law.