A Renewable Supergrid in Russia – IEEE Spectrum

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1. January 26, 2016 at 11:02 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   US Could Lower Carbon Emissions 78% With New National Transmission Network
   http://news.slashdot.org/story/16/01/25/2338209/us-could-lower-carbon-emissions-78-with-new-national-transmission-network

   mdsolar writes with this story from Smithsonian magazine about how building a national transmission network could lead to a gigantic reduction in carbon emissions. From the story: “The United States could lower carbon emissions from electricity generation by as much as 78 percent without having to develop any new technologies or use costly batteries, a new study suggests. There’s a catch, though. The country would have to build a new national transmission network so that states could share energy. ”

   The U.S. Could Switch to Mostly Renewable Energy, No Batteries Needed
   Better electricity sharing across states would dampen the effects of variable weather on wind and solar power
   http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/us-could-switch-mostly-renewable-energy-no-batteries-needed-180957925/?no-ist

   The United States could lower carbon emissions from electricity generation by as much as 78 percent without having to develop any new technologies or use costly batteries, a new study suggests. There’s a catch, though. The country would have to build a new national transmission network so that states could share energy.

   “Our idea was if we had a national ‘interstate highway for electrons’ we could move the power around as it was needed, and we could put the wind and solar plants in the very best places,” says study co-author Alexander MacDonald, who recently retired as director of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.

   One of the big issues with wind and solar power is that their availability is dependent upon the weather. Solar is only available on sunny days, not during storms or at night. Wind turbines don’t work when the wind doesn’t blow enough—or when it blows too much. Because of this, some studies have argued that these technologies are only viable if large-capacity batteries are available to store energy from these sources to use when they aren’t working. That would raise the cost of electricity well beyond today’s prices.

   But “there’s always wind and solar power available somewhere,” MacDonald notes. So he and his colleagues set out to design a low-carbon electricity-generation system that better incorporated—and even took advantage of—the nation’s weather. Their study appears today in Nature Climate Change.

   Their computer model showed that by switching to mostly wind and solar power sources—with a little help from natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear power when the weather doesn’t cooperate—the United States could reduce carbon emissions by 33 to 78 percent from 1990 levels, depending on the exact cost of renewable energy and natural gas.

   Adding coal into the mix did not make electricity any cheaper, but it did result in a 37 percent increase in carbon emissions.

   The key to this future would be the development of a system for transferring electricity across the country, so that a windy day in North Dakota could power a cloudy, calm day in New York. This would not only require new agreements between states—Texas, for instance, has its own separate power grid—but also an upgrade to the transmission lines that move electrons from one place to another.

   In most areas, energy moves over high-voltage alternating current lines, but there are limitations in how far these lines can transmit energy. Switching to high-voltage direct current would let energy producers transmit more electricity a longer distance.

   Building a new network for transmitting electricity would be a big job. But the computer model showed that it can be cost effective, because in the long run it would allow cheap power to be available

   “By building these transmission facilities, we reduce the costs to remove the carbon rather than increasing it,”

   “We can use existing transmission pathways,” Jacobson says, and just improve the lines that run across them. “You don’t need as many new pathways as you think.”

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2. January 27, 2016 at 10:10 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Grid modernization funding initiative announced
   http://www.controleng.com/single-article/grid-modernization-funding-initiative-announced/8a52addb911fa9cc411a9423e520742b.html

   The Energy Department’s Grid Modernization Initiative includes an award of up to $220 million over three years to support critical research and development.

   U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Ernest Moniz announced the release of a Grid Modernization Multi-Year Program Plan, which is designed as a blueprint for modernizing the grid. The Secretary also announced the award of up to $220 million over three years, subject to congressional appropriations, to the DOE’s National Labs and partners to support critical research and development.

   “Modernizing the U.S. electrical grid is essential to reducing carbon emissions, creating safeguards against attacks on our infrastructure, and keeping the lights on,” said Secretary Moniz. “This public-private partnership between our National Laboratories, industry, academia, and state and local government agencies will help us further strengthen our ongoing efforts to improve our electrical infrastructure so that it is prepared to respond to the nation’s energy needs for decades to come.”

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