The last thing renewable energy needs right now
are new transmission lines.
This statement is heresy in the green community, but there’s a danger that the increasing focus of green energy advocates on a new nationwide transmission superhighway may undermine the pursuit of near-term renewable energy goals.
People are excited by renewable energy. It’s clean. It’s limitless. It’s local. It’s the one kind of energy source that anyone can harness. Public polls show substantial majorities of Americans in every state favoring more renewable energy.
And states have an abundance of renewable energy assets. A new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance—Energy Self-Reliant States—shows that every state has the potential to meet its renewable energy goal or mandate and that 3 in 5 states could get all of their electricity from in-state renewable resources. Almost every state could get at least 20 percent of its electricity from rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV) alone.
These renewable assets can be tapped for significant local benefits. A single wind turbine, for example, creates $1 million in economic activity, according to the American Wind Energy Association. And that’s just a generic, utility size turbine. Locally owned wind projects can create twice the jobs and 3 to 4 times the economic impact of absentee owned projects.
The benefits from locally harnessed renewable energy create a feedback loop, building even greater public support for clean energy.
People are not so excited about new high-voltage transmission lines.
Transmission legislation moving through Congress would preempt longstanding state regulatory authority over transmission line approval and siting. The goal is to speed the construction of a $100 to 200 billion interstate transmission superhighway, bringing solar power from the Southwest and wind from the Great Plains to the coasts.
Why is this problematic? Let’s ignore for a moment that most people wouldn’t care to live by a 150 foot tower running through a 200 foot swath of denuded landscape. Or to have their land seized for this purpose by eminent domain.
Many states oppose the new transmission superhighway for two reasons. One, it’s expensive. Two, it undermines efforts to reap the economic rewards of renewable energy self-reliance.
In a New York Times Op Ed, the Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, Ian Bowles, wrote:
Lawmakers should resist calls to add an extensive and costly new transmission system that would carry electricity from remote areas like Texas, the Great Plains, and Eastern Canada to places with high energy demands like Boston, Chicago, and New York ... Renewable energy resources are found all across the country; they don’t need to be harnessed from just one place.
In May 2009, the governors of 10 East Coast states wrote to senior members of Congress to protest. Requiring their residents and businesses to pay billions of dollars for new transmission lines that would import electricity from the upper Midwest and Southwest into their region “could jeopardize our states’ efforts to develop wind resources ... “ They added, “it is well accepted that local generation is more responsive and effective in solving reliability issues than long distance energy inputs.”
Nine of the 10 Eastern states whose governors signed the May 2009 letter could get over 80 percent of their electricity from in-state renewable resources, according to Energy Self-Reliant States. And local energy also means fewer legal battles over the siting of unsightly transmission towers, a fact that politicians in that region are unlikely to have overlooked.
It’s not just state energy self-reliance and economic benefits hanging in the balance. A recent study released by Duke University’s Climate Change Policy Partnership throws cold water on the renewable energy transmission passion. It found that the proposed interstate transmission links from regions with low-cost electricity (e.g. the Great Plains) to regions with high-cost electricity (e.g. the East Coast) could enable coal power as easily as renewables, with poor results for carbon emission reductions and other environmental goals.
The evidence undermines the conventional wisdom about high-voltage, long-distance transmission and should raise red flags among advocates. To the people in affected states, a new transmission superhighway is costly, anathema to local energy generation, and a potential enabler of coal-fired power. It creates winners (in the sunny Southwest) and losers (in the “import states” on the East Coast).
A victory for interstate transmission may be at the expense of broader public support for renewable energy.
Renewable energy does not have to be harnessed in a few, select areas and shipped across country. And public support for clean energy may hinge on the opposite.
The ubiquity of renewable energy means that the transition to a clean energy economy can also be a transition to a new, local energy future, where the economic and environmental benefits of powering the economy are everywhere the sun shines.
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Comments
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neosapiens Posted 9:45 pm
19 Oct 2009
I really like the idea of having millions of small projects rather than a few hundred or a few thousand big ones. I suspect that it would be quicker and easier to build and more reliable in the long run, but I worry about the politics.
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setb Posted 7:10 am
20 Oct 2009
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Al Breingan Posted 6:04 pm
20 Oct 2009
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Gar Lipow Posted 6:27 pm
20 Oct 2009
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amazingdrx Posted 9:01 pm
20 Oct 2009
The electron super highway ought to be buried HVDC. The stray voltage induction effects of AC are not a problem with DC either.
So this national high voltage grid will only be used to transport power from the southwest or the plains to the coasts? Why wouldn't it be used to transport wind and water power from the coasts inland too? Or used to transmit surplus power from any region that is sunny on any particular day to an area that is cloudy?
The whole point of a continental grid is to smooth the supply by tapping into diverse sources in different areas, acting a lot like a national battery.
At 100 to 200 billion over 10 or 20 years why would a national grid exclude local renewable energy? In fact it would encourage it. And it would also encourage industrial scale offshore wind/wave power, and great lakes wind power, and desert southwest industrial solar.
Those very large private investments would flow very quickly to these projects as the grid was built strategically to handle the firsat big projects and then on to wind farm after solar furnace project, and even distributed biogas waste biomass projects all over farm country.
When investors in solar panels on their roof or investors in offshore wave/wind floating platforms and gulf stream underwater turbines and farm biogas energy investors can all sell their surplus kwhs through the supergrid, it will create an exponential commercial wave of renewable energy investment and manufacturing.
And that massive change will build quickly enough to counter the exponential climate change that is melting the ice caps and glaciers and releasing methane from the melting tundra. Little local steps will fit in too, but really massive projects with trillions invested are necessary to get this done in time.
Your point about local projects creating more jobs would be a good one, but only if local projects and a national grid are mutually exclusive. They are not. In fact a national grid will allow local utilities to gather all the surplus from local solar panels or biogas fuel cell generators and sell it across the grid. Then local homeowners and farmers can be payed for their contribution, paying back their investment in their solar panels in record time.
But I agree, transmission towers are a bad idea, this grid should be buried in freeway medians, with electric commuter rail (in tubes) running over them. Put electric commuter rail and HVDC together. Commuter rail is being put on freeway medians in Minnesota already.
Small is beautiful, zero carbon footprint living in individual dwellings is possible. But to turn climate change around we need a massive industrial wave of the type that powered WW II war production.
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Michael Goggin, American Wind Energy Association Posted 6:33 am
21 Oct 2009
First of all, I think setting up an either-or choice between utilizing local renewable energy resources or better, more remote renewable resources is the entirely wrong way to look at energy policy. Too often we get sidetracked into these kind of debates and lose track of what Bill McKibben calls the "fierce urgency of now" (http://www.thestar.com/article/607657) - i.e. the need to do everything we can as soon as we can to change the carbon trajectory of our economy to avoid the worst consequences of severe climate change.
There is no reason why developing local renewable resources is or should be mutually exclusive with developing resources that are currently more remote. For example, offshore wind in the Northeast is actually highly complementary with wind from the Midwest, since offshore wind blows more during the day while Midwestern wind produces the most at night.
Right now there are over 300,000 MW of wind plants waiting to connect to the grid, but are unable to do so because of the inadequacy of our power grid. That number is not a typo - 300,000 MW is more than 10 times the amount of wind we currently have installed. We need all of that wind energy and more to be developed as soon as possible if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Also, your article overlooks the fact that developing local renewable resources will still require a large amount of transmission. In the Northeast and other highly populated regions, the best renewable resources are still located at considerable distance from where people live. Developing those resources will require large amounts of new transmission lines.
Similarly, you also attempt to claim that people in the Northeast would be net "losers" from building transmission to bring in wind from the Midwest. In fact, every study that has looked at the issue has found that consumers in the Northeast would realize net benefits to the tune of over $15 billion per year if transmission were built to bring in low-cost wind energy to offset their use of high-cost fossil fuels. (http://awea.org/pubs/factsheets/Transmission_and_Consumer_Savings.pdf) The only people who might not like new transmission are fossil fueled power plant owners in the Northeast who don't want competition that will limit their ability to charge exorbitant prices for electricity, but you won't see me crying any tears for them.
Michael Goggin,
American Wind Energy Association
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