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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

What's the benefit in modernizing the US's grid faster than it is being done already? Nobody wants to pay more for electricity, and while the Chinese government is motivated by the economic stimulus effect the US doesn't share that goal. If they started tearing down and replacing power lines that today are good enough you would have to pay for it.

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Modern HVDC transmission systems have lower losses. A re-design/upgrade/modernization would permit load managament to be optimised for the current population and industry needs, not the last centuries state. Its highly likely new paths, new poles, new pits, new transformers, new synchronous re-generators would be deployed. The transmission grid reflects the technologies used: if less coal and oil and gas is being used, its very likely there would be more points of storage and re-generation deployed, to leverage the surplus power inherent in a lot of solar and wind (which may not be currently captured)

Its not cheap. But, thats what re-capitalization of a public utility function is all about: the thing which makes no sense to any individual profit-seeker but which delivers a non-profit moment for the entire community: safer, (less polluting) more efficient (less loss in transmission, less loss of ephemeral power) and more resilient power.

"it costs more" is a false argument. All improvements "cost more" the question is "are they worth it" and I personally believe (very strongly) btw they are. I absolutely concede there is a case to be put "no, they aren't worth it" but I would prefer that case and the pro-case is made by operations-research, economists, power engineers than the Koch brothers.

It is very unlikely under current economic climate, that any of the TVA, or the west coast power, or a myriad of state investments made in the 30s 40s and 50s would be done: Not because they are bad, but because they generate low profit outcomes, and we have forgotten why corporate entities were invented in the first place. If you don't agree, consider the giant cluster-fuck of US bridges in urgent need of repair and the logjam behind "who pays" with the current federal government favouring handing the assets to private sector investors to maintain and then charge to use, compared to a more normal (I mean worldwide) model of using tax and other central spend planning to pay for utility infrastructure.

Which do you think makes more sense?

Yeah...the 500-kV projects that TVA built in the 50s are very useful today. They waaay overbuilt it then (they only needed 115 or 138 kV iirc) and that would never happen today.

The benefit of modernizing the grid is reduction of carbon emissions. The ideal geographic locations for wind and solar are not necessarily close to the consumers. If you lack the transmission capacity the plants have to throttle down and waste potential energy production which has to be compensated by plants closer to the consumers.

In that case you wouldn't want to modernize the grid just for the sake of it, you would want to reduce carbon emissions. The places where you would build out new infrastructure would be different if the plan was to connect solar panels in Nevada versus if you just went around to the oldest wooden poles and replaced them with newer ones.

When I lived in Maryland we had multiple-day blackouts several times after hurricanes because power lines were down. There was also a huge blackout along the whole east coast which also took days. In California transformers are starting wildfires. I think there is a lot to improve.

What China seems to be doing is replacing the complex tangle of distributed local generation and distribution with big, high-profile, headline-grabbing single point of failure power lines. That doesn't sound like a good way of avoiding blackouts due to weather taking out power lines - if anything, that's an argument against copying China.

The mentiones how they are building in redundancies and not running serveral of the links at full capacity to prevent just such a situation.

Building a line to run @ only 25% capacity isn't exactly super smart. We have these conversations all the time in grid operations and planning when we hear about these big projects. In power transmission you always have to carry power reserves for your single greatest contingency (actually more). Let's say your largest contingency today is the loss of a 900 MW nuke plant. So you have to always have an extra 900 MW laying around. Now go build a 4 GW line. What happens if it trips? Big changes around the regions on each side. Chances are you now have to carry considerable more reserves unless you operate it at a much lower percent of capacity. It's the same with large amounts of wind. If you suddenly see your wind forecast fall off a cliff and need to make up multiple GW of lost generation, you're in a really risky spot. You have to carry extra reserves and try to best anticipate the event and that also costs money. In a future with lots of big batteries, this isn't as problematic, but we're very far from having that much storage on the grid.

Which is why they need a network of the grids like the local ones in existence today. If you have 10 lines feeding into a mega city from different directions the reserve for a single failure can be lowered to 10%. You can also build pumped water hydro stations, which I don't see how batteries could ever match in capacity or efficiency. Batteries are good for smoothing out spikes but how can they deal with a failure that could take some time to resolve?

I would gladly pay double for the price of electricity (or more precisely double for the transmission component of the bill), maybe even triple if you give me a hard sale. The past few falls I've been breathing in air that's more polluted than Chinese air. The reason is because PG&E doesn't have enough money to invest in infrastructure because the rates are kept low by state regulators who only see "cheap power" as their mandate.

>that's more polluted than Chinese air.

What city is this? The US doesn't have a single city in the top 500. China makes up about half of the list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-polluted_cities_b...

SF during the recent wildfires caused by faulty PG&E infrastructure (local power utility) had the worst air quality index in the world, far beyond any Chinese (or Indian/Pakistani for that matter) city.

If PG&E didn't start the fire something else would have.

The past few falls though?

Maybe parent was in LA during the forest fires last summer? It can get up there even if only for a few weeks.

They said the past few falls though.

Bay Area power is hardly cheap. In the highest tier I'm paying $0.50/kWh base rate is about $0.20/kWh. The US average is $0.12/kWh. So I don't think the problem is PG&E offering electricity that is too cheap.

I mean, if you have the income to cover for double the electricity rate, than you would likely be required to pay more in taxes or other costs to ensure that your less fortunate neighbor can afford it and to ensure that the factory that employees 300 employees can remain competitive by giving them electricity grant. I also hope that you can get the whole neighborhood to buy into the idea for the sake of improving the air quality. As you can see, there is a lot of other variables that have to be accounted for, although I agree that we should strive for better air quality.

My monthly electricity bill is $25-$30 a month. Heck, my cellphone bill is more than this. I’m not sure what the price of clean air is, but paying a multiple of this amount doesn’t seem like something that would break the bank.

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