Creating Clean Energy Is Not Enough

By Mike Koetting May 21, 2024

The struggle to adjust to changing environmental conditions is not a challenge that can be resolved by fragmented, individual policy decisions. It requires a network of mutually organized and supportive policies. None of the individual policies will be perfect—and can certainly be pecked to death if we let it happen. But we will thrive, perhaps just survive, only if we look at how the totality of responses work together to achieve an adequate outcome.

What’s going on with the nation’s electric supply puts very bright lights on this issue.

Background

Power in the U.S. and Canada is generated from one of roughly 6,000 generation facilities of various sorts–from solar farms to coal fired generating stations–and sent through more than half-million miles of transmission lines to the local substation in your neighborhood. (The local substation is that fenced off area with a madcap collection of electrical pylons suggesting some mad scientist’s laboratory.)

The transmission lines in the U.S. are organized into roughly three separate grids—East, West and Texas. Power can flow relatively freely within these separate systems, but across them only with considerable difficulty. This is why when, three years ago, a severe winter storm crippled Texas’ power generation, it was mostly impossible to send power from other areas to relieve the pressure. Elsewhere in the country, widespread sharing happens more or less routinely in the event of significant local power failure.

The above makes it sound more organized than it in fact is. In theory, primary authority over power generation and transmission across the United States is vested in the Department of Energy Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But that excludes the Texas grid since, as a single state entity, it is not subject to federal authority. Moreover, the actual organization of the grids in the other two regions is really composed of a collection of regional associations with varying degrees of cohesion. In any event, most power is actually delivered by private companies—including building, or not building, the long-distance transmission lines. These private companies exist in a maze of state and municipal governments that have uncoordinated laws and regulations, all of which are subject to multiple competing demands. One analyst of our grid has alleged that the U.S. is the only developed country without any kind of overall grid plan.

Moreover, about 70% of this grid infrastructure is more than 25 years old and it is not being maintained sufficiently to meet current demand, let alone adjusting to new demands for electricity. It’s unclear who is ultimately responsible for managing the grid and everyone is trying to get someone else to pick up the bill.

However,  if we want to imagine a future that relies very heavily on clean electricity: we need to have enough electricity in total and we need to have a grid to move it around.

Aggregate Demand

Total demand for electricity is increasing much faster than anyone predicted even a few years ago. Predicted further demand varies from state to state, but increases between 35% and 45% by 2030 are not uncommon. Some of that is being driven by movement to environmentally advantageous technologies like electric vehicles and green industry. But the biggest factor currently driving surging electrical demand is the increase in the number of data centers, much of it being driven by planned increases in AI and, non-trivially, bitcoin mining.

The nation’s 2,700 data centers drew more than 4 percent of the country’s total electricity in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency. Its projections show that by 2026, they will consume 6 percent. Industry forecasts show the centers eating up an even larger share of U.S. electricity in the years that follow, as demand from residential and smaller commercial facilities stays relatively flat thanks to steadily increasing efficiencies in appliances and heating and cooling systems.

AI is remarkably energy consuming. By 2027, AI applications themselves will use as much energy as Ireland. That is only for the application. It does not include energy use in constructing the machinery and facilities or the cooling costs for that much hardware, which could add as much as 50% to the application cost. Future AI development will to some degree be limited by its bottomless demand for power.

Bitcoin mining is another significant electricity hog. Until 2021, most Bitcoin mining was in China. Then it drove out Bitcoin operations, citing their power use among other reasons. The United States quickly became the industry’s global leader. A New York Times analysis suggests that each of the nation’s 34 bitcoin operations uses at least 30,000 times as much power as the average U.S. home. The biggest US bitcoin operation uses as much power as the 300,000 homes closest to it. One analysis suggests that if all the bitcoin operations proposed for Texas were built, they could use one-quarter of the state’s electricity at peak demand.  (Whether or not this is a good use of resources, the Republican Party seems committed to it. At least two states, Arkansas and Montana, have passed laws guaranteeing bitcoin mining access to the grid. In his first administration, Donald Trump was a big supporter of bitcoin.)

Further stressing the grid—both in total demand and in connectivity—is the increase in extreme weather events. The persistent growth in global temperature is driving energy demands as people strive to keep cool in the summer. According to the Department of Energy, nearly two-thirds of the country is at risk for energy shortages in peak summer heat. A confounding factor, particularly in the West, is that low water levels are beginning to impact the amount of hydro-electricity that can be produced.

Connectivity

Even where there is sufficient supply, it doesn’t do much good if there is no way to match it to demand. At present, there is simply not enough transmission capacity. According to the Department of Energy, the US needs to more than double current regional transmission capacity and increase by five-fold the transmission lines between regions. In fact, however, the number of new transmission lines installed in the US has dropped sharply over the last decade. There are multiple reasons—increased local opposition, people not wanting to pay for them, and the tangle of bureaucratic processes.

Source: Department of Energy, 2023

The problem is particularly vexing in terms of getting clean power to where it is most needed. Across the nation, the waitlists for large projects to connect to the grid — and deliver power to homes and businesses — have ballooned, leaving over 1,400 gigawatts of wind and solar power in limbo. (By way of comparison, total US energy demand is about 4 million gigawatts.) A recent report based on a survey of 123 wind and solar developers nationwide found that the grid-connection process was the top cause of delays of six months or more, followed by local ordinances and zoning, community opposition and supply chain issues. Across the nation, about one-third of all transmission projects are litigated.

The community opposition often includes opposition to transmission lines because of other environmental concerns. For instance, two miles remain to be built of a 102-mile high-voltage transmission line between Iowa and Wisconsin, expected to connect more than 160 renewable-energy facilities to the Midwestern grid. This project is threatened because of litigation brought by environmental groups. Elsewhere, environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have joined a roughly six-year effort to stop transmission lines that would bring hydropower from Quebec to New England. The inability to get clean energy on the grid has already resulted in several coal-fired generators being kept on line longer than anticipated, while in other places, where coal-fired generators were closed because of expected clean energy, the delays are creating shortages.

What Can Be Done

There are several things that could be done, but what it would take to generate sufficient political will is not as obvious as the need.

It seems to me the first step would be to develop some kind of overall plan for the national grid, what with it being the backbone of life as we know it. But in my reading for this essay, I did not run across a single suggestion to that effect. Apparently, anyone who knows enough about this topic thinks the possibility so remote as to not bear mentioning. I concede it would be formidable, but it seems so obvious I guess it is my lack of real knowledge that causes me to suggest it.

With or without real plans, it is going to be necessary to allocate huge funding. Maintaining, upgrading and expanding the grid is an expensive endeavor. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act authorized substantial sums for these projects, but quite a bit more will be needed. Failure to build out the grid will hobble the transition to clean energy. A Princeton University study suggests as much as 80% of the potential benefits of the Inflation Reductions Act (IRA) could be lost if the pace of transmission construction doesn’t pick up dramatically.

Equally important, there must be some reform of the overall regulatory process for grid construction. Last week’s adoption by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, over Republican opposition, of a new rule to streamline how power lines are sited and how costs are shared between states is a good start. However, being a bit of a cynic, I’m guessing it will be endlessly litigated, so actual implementation is uncertain. There is also the danger that people with otherwise worthy goals allow those to get in way of meeting our energy needs.

Finally, we need to encourage projects that reduce the strain on the grid. These include projects that would incorporate generation capacities into the construction of facilities themselves. One of the inadvertent benefits of the difficulty of hooking up to the current gird is that it is forcing some of the larger consumers of electricity to consider how to reduce reliance on the grid. Along similar lines, the ability of quantumly improved battery capacity could reduce the need for grid use by saving excess but variable clean supply (e.g. solar or wind) for times when it was otherwise not available.

What I see from my brief excursion into our electric grid is that the technology is evolving at a sufficient pace that a timely transition to clean energy could be possible. The challenge comes from the political difficulties inherent in managing the technology. It looks like we can maintain an overall high standard of living, but we won’t be able to do so without adapting to new realities. If we remain stuck in the country defined by Rick Perry’s comment that Texans find massive power outages preferable to having more federal interference in the state’s energy grid, the odds are good we will all be facing more power outages. But we face a similar outcome if we demand every project address all our hopes and lose focus on what trade-offs really need to get made.