Reconductoring: An easy way to expand the grid | Hacker News Reader

Reconductoring: An easy way to expand the grid

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56 points0xbadcafebee38 comments

Here’s a great hour long discussion on reconductoring

https://www.volts.wtf/p/one-easy-way-to-boost-the-grid-upgra...

Here's a related Volts episode on better assessing the real-time (weather-related) capacity of transmission lines (to avoid new transmission in some cases): https://www.volts.wtf/p/getting-more-out-of-the-grid-weve

Easy is not a word that I would use to describe reconductoring. It is a hard job that requires a ton of planning and in a lot of cases removes redundancy from a substation while its being done. It isn't simple or stupidly easy or any other kind of easy. Why would someone write such an out of touch mass of words.

I think the point of the article was not that reconductoring is simple, but that it's easier than building new transmission capacity given the insane NIMBY vetocracy that makes such construction essentially impossible. It's a political fix, rather than a technical one.

Personally my preferred solution would be permitting reform such that transmission capacity is approved and built by-right and NIMBYs can go pound sand if they don't like it, but you have to deal with the political landscape you have, not the one you want.

I have no insight on the ease of reconductoring, stupid or not.

I do know that permitting a new transmission line route -- parallel to an existing route of insufficient capacity -- is severely constraining the further development of a known, existing geothermal resource. I was quoted a delay of 10-ish years for that permitting process by one of the higher-ups in the geothermal company involved.

I heard somewhere that during the New Deal era, there was a regulation on the books that allowed the Army Corps of Engineers to file paperwork in the courthouse at 9am and roll bulldozers after lunch. It's a shame we can't bring that back. It would fix so many gordian knots of lawsuits that keep the US stuck in the 1900s.

Those gordian knots also keep the government from just steamrolling over your house and land in the time period of a few hours. Pros and Cons

I basically agree but I also think one should be careful with this line of reasoning. The vast majority of nonsense in these cases stem from environmental law and a small minority of those cases are actually legitimate.

I'd rather we had a few bad calls on eminent domain cases and 25,000 miles of modern high speed rail, rather than 100% correct calls and the nearly zero miles of high speed rail we have now.

High speed rail solves a tiny fraction of the actual problem. Refocus on proper rezoning and build out of cities more like the netherlands because that is where the vast majority of the problem actually is. The city is also where the bad calls are thr most impactful to the human population

Why, so they can destroy even more of the US? My home stated was basically ruined thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers.

Louisiana?

Seems to me it is new construction vs upgrade, and most folks that build things favor new construction. People that pay for things favor upgrades. I think the answer is in the middle.

They said it has already been done enough to know that it costs 50%. "Not easy" is meaningless and not an argument.

It’s the breathless one-dimensional optimism of Wired Magazine and TED talks

If it's new construction or this stuff you're gonna be pulling wire either way, so the substantive difference here is there's no need to wade through the thicket of permitting and legal battles involved with getting a new right-of-way. So yeah, by comparison this is a hell of a lot easier than getting new lines built.

This feels like a PR submarine for a company which I'm guessing makes the conductors or does the replacement operation. Utilities are not stupid so I doubt doubling capacity is as easy or cost free as the article makes out.

I was once in charge of reconductoring numerous high voltage transmission lines in California. we used novel conductors when they were warranted.

When I read comments on Hacker News about something I'm otherwise intimately aware of, some of the comments read like those which would be written on 9gag.

My boss never stopped me from upgrading a transmission line because there are more expensive projects to do.

Another thing I see is that so many people in tech are easily bamboozled by a slick marketing presentation and think that the people in power are hiding away the cool technology.

> But the bigger issue is that utilities are not incentivized to look for cheaper, more efficient solutions like reconductoring because they profit off capital spending.

I have no knowledge of how the regulatory funding mechanism works for US utilities, but I can say from experience that the UK regulator really does push for networks to find the minimum cost solution.

There are other measures that can be taken before restringing. At a high level, these are the things that can be done to alleviate an overhead line constraint:

* Are there any viable operational mitigations - i.e., can the normal running arrangement of the network be modified, such as transferring load on to another substation?

* Are flexibility/demand response services an option?

* Line reprofiling (changing fittings on towers, clearing vegetation) to run the line at a higher temperature

The US has horrifying amounts of corruption in utility regulatory bodies. Often times these are elected positions, but get little attention, and so the utilities can essentially buy themselves seats. One particularly bad example is in Arizona:

https://www.degreespod.com/episodes/episode-09

There is also a lot of malfeasance at the legislative level. In Ohio, for just a few million dollars, utilities bought some very profitable legislation:

https://www.cincinnati.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/06/03...

These are some of the extreme examples, but in general these regulatory bodies are poorly supervised and run by cronies of the utilities. And in California, even if the regulators are not corrupt, they are so incompetent that they may as well be bought off. PG&E has some of the highest costs for transmission and distribution of electricity in the country, yet transmission still causes fires and deaths. And it wasn't that long ago that they killed families in their homes with a gas line explosion.

In California specifically, IOUs like PG&E run off of a cost plus model on T&D and make no profit on generation (legacy of Enron) - surprise surprise T&D is growing by a CAGR of ~12% every year. Abhorrent set of incentives and the CPUC generally rubber stamps all of it.

https://www.ktvu.com/news/pge-profits-soar-after-rate-hikes

> PG&E reports it made a $2.24 billion dollar profit last year — a 24% increase from the year before.

> In a call with investors, PG&E credits last year's rate increases with boosting its bottom line and said it expects to remain profitable through 2028.

> "Shareholders are pocketing money based on record rate increases," said Mark Toney, executive director of the non-profit TURN, the Utility Reform Network.

> Toney said PG&E is planning to ask state regulators to approve more rate hikes in the future.

> "PG&E has currently sitting on the desk of the California Public Utilities Commission, no less than 12 separate proposals for increases – twelve," he said.

Wouldn't reconductoring also have the added benefit of literally recapturing the old lines for recycling & re-manufacturing?

While permitting and long delays are a problem, I think the biggest argument is over who pays for the new lines, whether they are separate lines or reconductored lines. The utilities want the solar and wind farm owners to pay, the farm owners want the utilities or state or federal government to pay. Still haven't heard of any big national or state efforts to double the capacity of their existing electric infrastructure, no matter which way it's done. So if they leave it up to the utilities and the utilities push the costs to businesses, then businesses will be less interested. Also, more than lines are needed, transformers in particular currently take years to build and doubling the line capacity does not double the transformer capacity. It does sound like reconductoring isn't being considered as often as it should though, particularly as a way around permitting problems, so it would be good if that changed. I've wondered if adding sensors to power lines so they can be run at higher capacity is actually a good thing. It means running more of the grid at the very edge of its capabilities, which seems certain to cause more failures. The power engineers would know better than I what the risks are there. You have to wonder why power line sags are causing wildfires in the West when the utilities there could just add some relatively inexpensive sensors to prevent them. It sounds like the utility companies have no incentive to change anything for any reason so change will have to either be mandated or incentivized (or both). High tension lines could also be replaced with DC interconnects or someday with superconducting lines, so there may be other possibilities also. Large capacity storage could play a role also; a line could be run at full capacity off-peak to charge/build up the storage, and then the stored energy used to supply more capacity than the lines can carry at peak. Distributed generation should be part of the solution also. Solar and wind don't have be built as large centralized farms. You don't need a bigger grid if the power is generated close to where it is used.

In The Netherlands we suddenly have too much power because a lot of houses and buildings now generate solar power. That's why there is a need to reconduct the net with high temperature cables.

But the main problem is planning and time. It will take almost 8 years to finish the reconducting transition while the energy transition is aleady taking place.

Reconductoring is not always easy. On a heavy loaded net you need to be careful to keep redundancy.

".... part of the problem is just a lack of awareness and comfort with the technology. But the bigger issue is that utilities are not incentivized to look for cheaper, more efficient solutions like reconductoring because they profit off capital spending."

More people need to realize that utilities are not at all like normal businesses, so to spell it out in more detail for those that don't know:

Normal businesses make more money when they cut costs. Utilities (typically) get to charge a fixed upsell percentage and so they make more money when they increase their costs.

Oh good another thread I won't be able to read through without white knuckling through some stupendously over-confident developers who think they know everything there is to know about the transmission system because they learned ohms law in university.

HN is an amazing community but some conversations are just an auto-opt-out for me.

It can be good to criticize knowledge levels when there's some specificity that allows people to improve. But very vague complaints don't contribute much.

And it's interesting what is considered "knowledge" versus "tradition" in the space. Hang out on a forum of grid ops over the last two decades, and you will find that a lot of the "knowledge" about the industry is really just plain wrong, and better understood by a technologist than by a practitioner.

Like the idea of the necessity of spinning reserves. Grid ops know they need reactive power, and lots of spinning turbines to help keep it. But they don't realize the power of solar inverters to perform the same thing, so you hear stories about the entire grid falling apart when you hit 5% solar. Really silly stuff, but it turns out if you think from first principles instead of "common sense" you can envision a much better future.

...spinning reserve has almost nothing to do with reactive power control? Do you know what reactive power is? Spinning reserve is almost entirely there as a means of secondary frequency response.

You're not making your case very well ...

> Congress is still debating how to reform permitting processes

Imagine the government making something easier, less expensive, and faster, rather than adding yet another hurdle.

Imagine election reform that made bribery (AKA political contributions) illegal.

Easier, less expensive, and faster for who? Who, exactly, are we trying to benefit here?

"Ask any climate wonk what’s holding back clean energy in the U.S. and you’re likely to get the same answer — not enough power lines. "

I have never read about problems with not enough power lines, its always about all other other factors related to inconsistent production. A power plant given coal or natural gas or other fixed inputs produces a set amount of power. But 1 huge unexpected wind gust and lines can blow, and someone please monitor all those pesky clouds around the solar production because we need at least 5 minutes to get the coal plant producing.

> But 1 huge unexpected wind gust and lines can blow, and someone please monitor all those pesky clouds around the solar production because we need at least 5 minutes to get the coal plant producing.

Neither can a single wind gust bring down the power lines, nor can a coal power plant ramp up in five minutes.

> we need at least 5 minutes to get the coal plant producing.

That's probably not coal but gas.

Although I don't think any can get as low as 5 minutes, pulverized coal plants can start quite quickly. On the order of minutes.

Or maybe hydro or battery? Gas turbine peakers might be able to hit five minutes, but if they are it's probably because they are not starting from cold.

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