To fight climate change, America must get better at electricity transmission | Hacker News Reader

To fight climate change, America must get better at electricity transmission

theatlantic.com

The article makes a great point that local utilities generally enjoy a captured market and new transmission decreases their market power, so utilities are not as pro-new transmission as one might think.

Also I did not know that FERC alone currently can approve natural gas pipelines through multiple states, but electric transmission requires approval from every state the line passes through.

Hopefully Congress corrects this.

And where is the energy to be jammed into those transmission lines going to come from. That is a zero-sum question. You can't get electricity for free or by magic. And especially not the baseline.

What power sources actually could ever fit the bill?? It's NOT Green - it's nuclear. Period.

I strongly support nuclear, but there are key benefits to incorporating more transmission as wind and solar are added to the grid.

Both utility scale wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy. But they occur in concentrated, geographically changing areas. I.e. a high pressure system creates a cloudless sky, great for solar and but wind. And 1,500 miles a way a low pressure system is creating tons of wind but no solar.

The most cost efficient way to balance such a grid is to use large amounts of transmission to 'smooth out' these geographic correlations - moving the solar and wind to places where the other is absent.

Only large scale transmission can create a full transmission to a zero carbon wind with about 20% of the total provided by nuclear. You can add more nuclear, but then it increases the total cost of the zero carbon system. [1]

[1] https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...

In the Northeast, just buy it from the north.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_%E2%80%93_New_England_T...

Is nuclear not considered green? I know many people / organizations who support green energy like Greenpeace would agree with you.

Actually, Greenpeace is notoriously anti-nuclear: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/ending-the-climate-crisis/iss...

This has produced conspiracies that Greenpeace has been funded by the fossil fuel industry for that reason, but I haven't looked into those claims.

Yes, that is what I meant. Greenpeace doesn't like nuclear and they don't call it green.

I typically consider nuclear to be green, but I wanted to understand if other people (not including Greenpeace and organizations like them) agreed that it is considered green.

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