![]() ![]() Building a national grid would help Democratic states accomplish their climate goals, but it would also help Wyoming, one of the only states where companies can build new nuclear- or geothermal-power plants, by connecting it to millions of willing customers on the coasts. It would streamline electricity markets, reduce power bills, and allow urban wealth to flow to rural areas. Building a national grid is one of the great remaining tasks of this development. economic development, from the railroads to the internet, consists of doing one particular move over and over again: creating, unifying, and regulating immense internal markets. China has excelled at this new industry, building monumental direct-current lines that send electrons more than 2,000 miles to its coasts.Įven if climate change didn’t exist, building a national grid would still be worthwhile. But only in the past decade or so has truly continent-spanning transmission become possible. got better at moving electricity hundreds of miles via those high-tension wires you sometimes see next to interstates. (I am an unpaid journalism fellow at the institute.) A century ago, long-distance transmission was impossible: If you used electricity, it came from a hydroelectric dam or coal-power plant a few dozen miles away at most. But those cost declines only matter if the largest power markets are connected-via new transmission!-to those areas.Ĭicala laid out his thinking in a paper published earlier this year by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. As Steve Cicala, an economics professor at Tufts University, recently told me, solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of electricity generation in some parts of the country. ![]() must triple its transmission infrastructure in order to decarbonize by 2050, according to a landmark Princeton study. When policy makers argue about electricity and climate change, most of the fuss is over generation: How can we make as much power as possible without using fossil fuels? But transmission-moving electricity over long distances-is of increasing importance. has an opportunity to fix its dumpy transmission system forever. ![]() I respect their caution-but right now, with the infrastructure bill, the U.S. This sorry history has led transmission advocates to push for a nuanced set of regulatory policies that would encourage better outcomes under the current system. Since 2009, China has built more than 18,000 miles of ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines. In 2011, President Barack Obama attempted to accelerate the completion of seven major new transmission lines. In the past decade, the United States has struggled to build new transmission lines linking different regions of the country, even though such lines are essential to basically any vision of the future national economy. Because for all their might, their ability to domesticate lightning and hurl it across the continent, they have failed to make much progress against the forces of the dark-in this case NIMBYs, old-school environmentalists, and utility lawyers. So they are venerated, yes, but also pitied. Yet the town would surely be overrun without their protection. They are sorcerers who understand one of the most powerful, corrupted bodies of knowledge in existence-American electricity law-but it has prematurely aged them and led them to scuttle around, muttering incoherent spells: “ Ferck and nerck, ferck and nerck, ferck purpa noper.” Strange-lunatic, even? No question. In energy circles, the people who work on transmission are feared and respected in the same way a shriveled and reputable local mage might be. I started to care about electricity-transmission policy. Sign up to get T he Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.Ī terrible thing happened to me recently. ![]() Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. ![]()
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