Bill Meehan Esri,
Allie Kelly, The Ray
During World War II, the future U.S. president (then General) Dwight Eisenhower, was impressed with German autobahns. He saw these high-speed roadways facilitating citizen movement throughout the country. He also saw a military advantage in moving troops and materials. His vision of an interstate highway system led to the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 on June 29, 1956. Some people have described the completed Interstate Highway System as the greatest engineering achievement ever.
One could argue that the U.S. electric grid is an equivalent engineering marvel.
The good news is that this grid will carry an entirely new, clean energy source to reduce greenhouse gas production dramatically. The clean grid will fuel a new generation of emission-free products, from EVs to heat pumps to carbon capture devices. It will even power the production of green hydrogen. There are enough renewable resources in the U.S. to power the future electric demand and project developers can build today in the queue. They are ready to connect to the grid now to meet the projected energy demands for 2030.
The Bad News
The built grid cannot accommodate the projected energy demand and the new sources. The recent U.S. Department of Energy Transmission Needs Study tells the story. It says that to meet the 2035 carbon reduction goals, the U.S. will need twice as much regional and four times as much interregional transmission as it currently has. A five-year backlog of renewable generation is in the queue today, waiting for approval to be connected to the grid.
Unlike the Interstate Highway System, utilities created the grid from the bottom up. They gradually connected their systems to form today’s grid as they grew. The industry awakened rudely on Tuesday, November 9, 1965, when the Northeast suffered a widespread blackout. This disaster led to the birth of a new regulatory entity called the North American Reliability Corporation (NERC). The 1965 blackout and the later 2003 blackout underscored the inherent weakness of the grid. The main culprit was the vulnerability of the grid itself. The remedy for this is more lines. A further weakness of the grid is bottlenecks. These bottlenecks (or transmission congestion) limit power flow across the nation. This results in the inability to provide lower-cost power to regions that experience high power costs. Spending money on the expansion of the grid has the potential to lower wholesale power costs to consumers.
According to the DOE’s Transmission Needs Study, most of the money spent over the last decade on transmission was for hardening, not increased capacity. We need both. This quote from Canary Media describes the situation well: “The grid may be the weakest link in the chain connecting the U.S. to a clean energy future -and a big part of the challenge is how to site the lines while respecting landowner rights, limiting environmental damage, and accelerating the construction process.”
Siting new transmission lines has been a huge issue—resulting in major delays and sometimes canceling grid expansion projects results.
A Look at the Interstate Highway System
The interstate highway system has the potential to supply 24 percent of the total transmission required for clean energy transition. A recent White House Report, U.S Innovation to Meet the 2050 Climate Goals, states, “repurposing existing transportation rights-of-ways… offers the opportunity to accelerate siting and reduce costs of expanding the transmission system.” What is little understood by the energy industry is categorical exclusion (CE). CE means utilities can avoid costly siting and permitting issues, such as land acquisition, easements, and the painful eminent domain process.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to the Rescue
GIS is a software system that creates, manages, analyzes, and maps all types of data. That includes transmission assets, rights-of-way, land features, demographics and more.
GIS reduces project time and cost. It increases the precision of planning and designing the expansion of the grid. GIS is the main tool for siting future clean energy projects. It can do the same for the grid.
The Ray, a non-profit based in Georgia, is a proving ground for the evolving ideas and technologies that will transform the transportation infrastructure of the future. The Ray offers land use analysis and planning tools for local, state, and federal agencies. It uses Esri’s ArcGIS technology to evaluate transportation rights-of-way for transmission. The advanced mapping tool analyzes natural and built characteristics to assess suitability for grid expansion. It also produces 3D modeling for new buried transmission projects. The tool can analyze, visualize, and coordinate between federal and state agencies and stakeholders across the transportation and energy sectors.
The tool considers soils, water, sensitive species, existing infrastructure, vegetation, slope, and terrain, among other features, to derive a path with the least cost utilizing right-of-way. Users can alter costing weights to reflect local values and conditions. The tool also provides interagency planning analysis and collaboration.
GIS can deliver a common ground and understanding between agencies to identify options and solutions.
Wouldn’t It Be Nice
There is more good news. On May 13, 2024, the FERC issued a new order, FERC 1920, which calls for enhanced grid planning focusing on regional and interregional planning to facilitate the move to a clean energy society. It’s not enough to hope for a grid that can carry all this new renewable energy plus meet the overwhelming new electricity demands. Transmission planners must take advantage of all the resources available to them. Use of the highway system, leveraging dynamic transmission ratings, rebuilding lines with advanced technology, and targeting areas of transmission congestion are all part of the solution. Geospatial technology can help move the process, converting us from Wouldn’t it be Nice to Let’s Do This Now.
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