US Dept of Energy announces $1.5B in electric grid improvements | Hacker News Reader

US Dept of Energy announces $1.5B in electric grid improvements

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153 pointstoomuchtodo82 comments

The interconnect out of Texas is a big deal. Texas has some of the most ideal land for solar and wind development, but the isolation of their grid has always been a problem.

I am hopeful that Texas becomes a big exporter of power to Mexico and perhaps even Florida using an undersea HVDC cable (as Texas can then power Florida with solar later into the evening). Texas solar and wind potential is simply incredible compared to local load demands.

https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/economic-data/energy/2...

https://seia.org/state-solar-policy/texas-solar/

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ercot-solar-generation-texa...

https://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar-resource-maps.html

What is HVDC?

High voltage direct current

High Voltage Direct Current

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

The opposite of HVAC /s

Wouldn't that be CAVH?

yeah i got downvoted for a question that is legit, considering HVAC is air conditioning. hacker news has gone full reddit at times.

I sure hope they’re forced to winterize their infrastructure if they’re providing power elsewhere. The last thing we need is the next cold spell causing rolling blackouts in other states. ERCOT seems unable to force any of the necessary upgrades.

Climate, regulatory, culture in Texas has it adding more solar and wind to the grid faster than any other state.

Florida is slightly ahead in terms of solar growth[1].

(The close followers suggest it can't be too much a matter of state-level regulatory environment: New York is at 23% growth to Texas's 25%.)

[1]: https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/a-decade-of-u...

$1.5B sounds like a rounding error in terms of grid scale investment.. Is this significant?

That depends on how much a dollar is worth when they start the projects.

One medium-sized startup. That's it.

This is exciting, but I can't find many details about resilience and hardening for CMEs.

Carrington [1] class events keep me up at night.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

Same here. Expansion is great and all, but if it all goes down due to a massive CME we’re all screwed. I’ve heard estimates of $500M to improve resiliency for solar events. Why isn’t funding going toward that?

Southline is roughly El Paso to Tucson.

Still no interconnect from the wind belt that starts in the Texas panhandle and goes north to Canada.[1]

[1] https://www.dallasfed.org/-/media/Images/research/energy11/w...

Every time I head anti-electrification arguments around EVs, heat pumps, etc. it's usually a complaint about grid capacity. I always shake my head, because building more power lines is relatively easy on the scale of climate tech we need to kick all carbon emissions.

Let's brainstorm how to decarbonize fertilizer, or concrete.

That being said I am really glad to see more grid buildup! Especially as more renewables hit the grid. While locally intermittent, on the scale of the entire country they're fairly reliable and predictable.

Indeed, it is an annoying argument that boils down to

"What will we do!? Current supply doesn't meet future demand!"

>That being said I am really glad to see more grid buildup! Especially as more renewables hit the grid. While locally intermittent, on the scale of the entire country they're fairly reliable and predictable.

Here's what's coming that makes people uncomfortable and they don't expect or understand:

Oversupply.

Seasonally, during good weather, during certain times of day, there's just going to be more electricity produced by solar/wind than anybody needs. You don't need to store it or use every bit of it, the grid is going to say no and because they're just solar panels, they are perfectly fine. Solar electricity is so cheap that it just doesn't matter. What customers will end up paying for is capacity instead of usage. Maybe there will be instantaneous pricing that will drop to zero-ish intermittently and consumers and industry will find ways of profiting from that.

But a whole lot of "problems" people complain about with solar are very much reduced if you just have "too many" solar panels. And they're cheap so who cares?

Like what would California do with way too much solar power? Boil water in the cheapest possible infrastructure for desalination, an enormous still. Very energy inefficient, but who cares if you just have the amps to spare?

There are a lot of industrial processes where energy efficiency is a problem and so simple processes are replaced by more efficient complex ones... but if you have free energy building out that simple infrastructure to only run when energy is cheap suddenly makes a lot more sense.

The "annoying" thing that the naysayers are pointing out is that we are not building enough power generation to support universally switching to electric vehicles. Unfortunately this "annoyance" happens to be true.

Also, California struggles to get new desalination plants through environmental approval. And most industrial processes need continuous power, not just power whenever the weather looks good.

Speaking to people in the industry I get a vibe that there’s permits and regulations that are severely bottlenecking new green energy deployments https://finance-commerce.com/2024/03/report-inefficient-perm...

Eh.

Solar installs are growing faster than electric car purchases. (roughly 30% YoY vs 20%)

People just make up statistics in their head supporting their position. Go look for the statistics for vehicle purchases and PV installs.

PV installs are outpacing anyone's previous estimation by a significant margin.

I have solar panels myself. But let's be honest about what the technology can and cannot do.

Solar only makes energy while the sun is shining. Most people want to charge their electric cars at night, unless their employer has a charging station ready for them to use at work. (Many employers have a small number of charging stations for this purpose, but none of them that I'm aware of have enough charging stations for everyone.)

Batteries also are on the learning curve. https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

Despite the rapid growth in solar deployments, time-of-use charges for power are generally still lowest in the middle of the night. Unless or until that inverts, I don't think this is a problem.

You already presented the solution. There is no breakthrough technology to be made here, just make charging ports available everywhere so that people can charge during the day. This will make peak consumption happen during the day and PV viable. During the night, you can exploit CSP with salt batteries. Balance your electric usage and you aren now 100% fully electric. The possible differences can be arbitraged with lithium batteries.

China is doing it.

Isn’t something like Bitcoin mining a good candidate for an oversupply of energy?

Did you forget /s at the end of that?

Not particularly, the mining hardware depreciates fast, essentially being quite expensive to leave idle waiting for low energy prices, and the whole thing is kind of a gamble.

I’d think direct thermal solar would be cheaper for boiling water. Feed the steam to electric generators; the condensate is then your desalinated water.

You are missing the point. I’m talking about sinks for surplus electricity, and doing it cheaply with dead simple distillation setups. You’re talking about generating more electricity when it is needed least.

> Let's brainstorm how to decarbonize fertilize

Haber-Bosch process with green hydrogen...

> because building more power lines is relatively easy on the scale of climate tech we need to kick all carbon emissions.

Then why have the rates changed so much recently? More importantly if EVs are going to be the thing then home solar should be the way it get the majority of it's power. Why even build the lines? Isn't that just a subsidy?

> Let's brainstorm how to decarbonize fertilizer, or concrete.

I don't think you can. I think you should worry more about how concrete and fertilizer get _distributed_. This is essentially the same dynamic as the home solar problem above.

> on the scale of the entire country they're fairly reliable and predictable.

That's due to the way the grid itself is structure not how any one power source performs. No source of power is particularly reliable and unexpected maintenance intervals always occur. Point here being, if you try to switch a grid that's based on a mix of sources, over to a grid that isn't, you're probably going to end up with a surprising result or two during that misguided process.

Even if you have rooftop solar, you still need a grid capable of supplying 100% the power because there are cloudy days and long sequences of cloudy days

Yes but EVs have batteries and people don't drive them to depletion every single day. I should have been more clear, I didn't mean the whole house, I meant the just the EVs specifically, for now. It would completely alleviate their impact on the grid as a consumer power source.

The 800,000 American homes that added solar to their roofs last year cover 100% of the electric used by every EV that's ever been sold in the US. They cover the electric usage by the EVs purchased last year by multiples. At this rate, you can do nothing and residential solar will already add much more capacity to the grid than EVs are taking from it.

That’s only because a tiny number of EVs have been sold. We’re being told it’s the only option by 2035.

Potentially FROM 2035 only electric vehicles would be for sale on new car lots. Most gas cars already on the road will still be there for 10-20 years after that.

By then, Edison Electric Institute (a trade-group for utility companies) predicts 70-80 million EVs on the road in the US.

By 2030, 15% of US homes are forecast to have solar on the roof, which would continue covering 100% of the electric use of the nation's electric vehicles.

The average residential solar installation generates enough energy to cover a 14,000-mile-per-year vehicle's charging 3.5-4.5 times over. Each house with solar panels generates enough energy for its cars and some of the neighbors' cars that don't have solar.

I put solar on my roof two years ago. It's the average system size, taking up 2/3rds of the south-facing side of my roof. It cost 1/3rd the price of my car to get installed, it completely covers my fuel use for two cars, and it covers 100% of my home electric and heating bill 9 months out of the year.

EV electric use isn't a problem utilities need to solve so much as a solution to a lot of utilities' problems. 70 million EVs are many gigawatt-hours of battery storage that will be connected to the grid bidirectionally in the not-distant future. They can store renewable energy during the day and feed it back to the grid at night, they can power houses and businesses during peak load events so peaker plants don't need to be spun up, and lots of other things that will make the grid more resilient and cheaper to operate without significant capital expense to the utilities.

It's likely enough that there is a step change in technology by 2035 that pushes away from current estimates.

Even then, there are huge efficiencies of scale favoring industrial solar over rooftop.

The cost per KWH is at least 10x lower, and getting better. This is more than enough to counter the distribution costs.

The same is true for industrial storage.

All told, the only upside to rooftop is avoiding grid operators, Which will just raise their price to counteract any savings on the part of homeowners. everyone is still stuck with them unless they go to municipal operators

> home solar should be the way it get the majority of it's power

This would be a bad idea as it costs 3x more than utility scale PV.

Aren't those cost factors based upon the type of load curves we currently see? Isn't there some reason to suspect that the efficiency rating will drop if we experience much greater offsets between time of generation and time of demand with the types of peaks that EV charging might bring? Wouldn't it be nice to have all this without having to engage with the daunting prospect that is the "smart grid?"

> Aren't those cost factors based upon the type of load curves we currently see?

No, that would effect the price the electricity would fetch, not the cost to buy panels and put them on the grid. Home rooftop panels are so much more expensive because of economies of scale.

There's a common misconception that thinks of electricity like a fluid or supply chain. If you generate more of it locally, it reduces the load on the grid and you need to spend proportionally less on distribution. This is false: the actual electrons in AC move a small fraction of a millimeter, electrical potential travels at a speed that is effectively the speed of light, electric conductivity is all-or-nothing, and if you need the grid at all, you need the full expense of building and maintaining that segment of grid. You probably need some form of grid if only to even out load spikes (running your clothes dryer often takes 20x the power as all the lights and electronics in your house, but not everybody runs their clothes dryer at once) and manage seasonal variations (solar power, particularly in northern latitudes, can be 5x higher in summer than winter, which is not a problem when you're powering southerly residents' air conditioning but is when your cold house doesn't need A/C).

The load curve over time only matters to the extent that you can entirely remove remote consumption. You can use batteries to smooth out night and day. You can reduce the use of batteries by sponsoring V2H EVs and workplace charging, so that you charge your EV when solar is abundant in the day, and then drive it home to power the rest of your house. But this does nothing for summer vs. winter, it does nothing for wanting to run a clothes dryer or space heater (many of which actually exceed the max power draw of a whole-home battery), it does nothing for wanting to charge your EV up to full before a long road trip.

I am in favor of microgrids, but this is more a statement that we should rationalize our distribution infrastructure rather than that get rid of the grid entirely. When power plants were large centralized industrial buildings that needed a steady supply of fossil fuels delivered by road or rail, it made sense to just build a few of them and then have a huge grid that distributed the electricity everywhere. When you can put solar on every rooftop, it might make more sense to have the smaller remote communities all invest in rooftop or community solar, wire them up in a microgrid of ~1000 homes, put in a big utility-scale battery, but otherwise disconnect them from the main grid so that power lines don't go through tinder forests. And then the big cities draw from big utility-scale solar and wind farms in the desert, connected by conventional power lines along major transportation arteries. But there's still some grid there, it's just a smaller, cheaper grid where you make the connections that are easy to maintain and distribute generation to the remote communities that can run their own self-sufficient grid.

Porque no los dos?

Home solar/battery would provide a level of independence for each home and would lessen the load on the grid for air conditioning alone (almost 20% of grid utilization).

More of both!

At 3x the price it's not a good deal for taxpayers or ratepayers. If homeowners want to do it for independence that's fine but the cost should be on them. I'm fine with giving them a credit for reduced ghg emissions.

Sure, let them pay for it. Perhaps a low interest loan to help incentivize it but theoretically it pays off in 6-9 years and then free power and less grid load, and the loan is paid back.

And it still costs well below what my utility charges me. If the real cost of a thing is supposed to weigh into my incentives, I need to be able to buy it for that price.

The 30% federal tax credit is not a good deal for taxpayers. You probably also benefit from net metering and the utility probably doesn't recover infrastructure costs from you due to your reduced usage. That's a bad deal for ratepayers.

>> Let's brainstorm how to decarbonize fertilizer, or concrete.

> I don't think you can. I think you should worry more about how concrete and fertilizer get _distributed_. This is essentially the same dynamic as the home solar problem above.

Isn't the primary source of CO2 from fertilizer production a byproduct of producing hydrogen gas via steam methane reforming?

We can make hydrogen without starting from methane (namely: via electrolysis), but it's not economical in comparison, at this time. (Or clearly able to scale to quite the same degree, for that matter.) But I reject the claim that it's not possible (or, for that matter, that we don't know how to do it). The issue is that the negative externalities from CO2 emissions are not priced in such a way to render existing processes less cost-effective than carbon-free alternatives.

That said, I share some of your skepticism regarding how much we can conceivably decarbonize concrete production.

the grid capacity that people refer to is distribution grid capacity. The wires running to your home have finite capacity and almost always, not enough for all people to use EVs and heat pumps.

I wonder what the impact of the connection to Texas is going to be.

Are generators inside and outside of Texas already synchronized?

The project mentioned here is a HVDC transmission system. It does not require synchronization. There are already other DC grid ties.

Is $1.5B a lot or a drop in the bucket?

Drop in the bucket.

Dept of Energy: https://www.energy.gov/articles/biden-harris-administration-...

National Transmission Planning Study: https://www.energy.gov/gdo/national-transmission-planning-st...

Transmission Facilitation Program: https://www.energy.gov/gdo/transmission-facilitation-program

"The projects will enable nearly 1,000 miles of new electric transmission development and 7,100 megawatts of new capacity in Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

They include the Aroostook Renewable Project in Maine, the Cimarron Link in Oklahoma, Southern Spirit connecting the Texas grid for the first time to southeastern U.S. power markets and Southline in New Mexico.

The Energy Department's National Transmission Planning study released Thursday was meant to be a long-term planning tool.

It found that a substantial expansion of the transmission system throughout the entire contiguous United States would deliver the biggest grid benefits. That could also save the national electric system between $270 billion to $490 billion through 2050."

> Southern Spirit connecting the Texas grid for the first time to southeastern U.S. power markets

How will this work?

Wires.

It is a High-voltage DC transmission line and the infrastructure to connect to it. It runs HVDC, so there's no grid synchronization needed. The grid will still be "isolated", as there are already DC ties.

> Southern Spirit connecting the Texas grid for the first time to southeastern U.S. power markets

That doesn't make sense about "first time". Southern Spirit is a new HVDC transmission line (which is awesome and what we need, more please!). There are already Eastern DC grid ties. This would be a good bit bigger (not sure existing ties are even GWs) but I don't understand first. Could someone shed more light on that for me?

> That doesn't make sense about "first time".

ERCOT (Texas grid) is famous for operating independently of neighboring grids to avoid federal regulation under FERC.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/congress-texas-should-rethi...

Failing to actually answer the question posed. And this wouldn't be an interconnection requiring that same kind of federal regulation so pretty irrelevant in the end too. And besides your point is already obvious from the above comments.

But I guess we'll just state random Texas facts now. Did you know the state flower is the Bluebonnet?

The Wikipedia article[3] is not entirely clear and has a shocking failure to cite sources, but it claims the the Texas grid connects to the Eastern grid in two place with DC lines, and has an AC connection that has only been activated once in the Houston area.

What I suspect this is referring to is connecting to the SERC[1] area. I can't find a good source, but I suspect the existing connections are to the MRO[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SERC_Reliability_Corporation 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Reliability_Organizati... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection#Ties

The existing active connections are to SPP. The one inactive AC tie is to MISO I believe (which is getting one of the new HVDC ties) and yes these new connections will be to SERC (MISO and SOCO).

That means these new ties will be directly supplying the local grids of about half of the southeastern market which is a first all things considered.

> There are already Eastern DC grid ties.

Strictly speaking there are only three ties into any NERC interconnection. Two of them are ties into SPP. The other is a single AC tie into SERC but it was only briefly activated after Hurricane Ike and hasn't been activated since.

This new project has ties being built directly to both MISO and SOCO which means the texas grid will be connected directly to two of the four main operators of SERC (the southeastern grid/power market).

Ah ok, so I take it the other "East" ties are to MRO and this will be the first to SERC. Thanks for that clarification.

I'm having so much trouble finding details of the existing DC ties. I'd love to know more.

A quick search on ERCOT's website comes up with this doc

https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2020/07/30/ERCOT_DC_Tie_Ope...

This is great and leading me to answers for lots of questions I have. Thanks!

Definitely not the first, surprisingly hard to find clear data about the endpoints of the ties themselves but this random court document has a fairly clear diagram on page 3: https://www.nrg.com/assets/documents/energy-policy/ferc_work...

ERCOT also reports flows for the four existing DC ties: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/dctieflows

With that said the biggest tie is like half a GW, so my guess is that they used the term "power markets"" rather than "power grids" because the current links don't really function as a way to transfer bulk power between markets, even if the Texas grid is technically already connected outwards. Like in an emergency they can import a miniscule amount of power, but nobody's going to be seriously arb'ing power with the existing ties.

I think our energy policy the domestic kind is stuck in a centralized supply-centric policy, when home solar and storage offer a fundamental alternative.

Home solar combined with storage that can enable house to be temporarily or perhaps even permanently off-grid increases resiliency of communities tremendously during emergency situations, which are more common than you think they are.

In addition, by encouraging policies that will help drop the price of home solar closer to grid solar prices and storage costs, you may eliminate a lot of the need to upgrade the grid in order to provide home charging for EVs.

I don't deny the grid needs massive amounts of investment in order to enable it to adapt to new pricing, realities of solar and wind. But I dislike that the home aspect of power generation is essentially ignored at the federal policy level from department of energy.

Regions are all going to experience the same weather at the same time so long distance transmission saves you a vast investment in solar panels and local batteries at 99.9% uptime.

The huge advantage of local solar is intermittent power is useful even if it’s not that reliable. Being able to run a fridge/freezer 8 hours a day dramatically extends how long it takes food to spoil in the summer. Similarly there’s a huge difference in comfortable temperatures and what’s required to avoid your pipes freezing.

Obviously larger investments mean you’re more comfortable in a major disaster, but a mid sized solar install + backup generator + a grid connection is generally more cost effective.

You undersell the benefits of intermittent power. Provides: charging of devices, charging of cars (reduces reliance on fuel), ability to heat water and cook. Very salient point as many americans are currently dealing with tge challenges of no power and also no water (following hurricane helene).

> charging of cars

Add a way for the home electric system to draw power from the vehicles batteries (or even V2G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ), and it becomes even more useful.

Local-first generation wants big interconnection transmission grids (for moving excess peak generation to off-peak timezones), and the federal government is way better capitalized to support these kinds of projects. State or even sub-State policy is way better suited to manage the highly heterogeneous landscape of generating power at individual homes, both because the problem is smaller $ but also just has a lot of little regional wrinkles (what power mix is best for the location, what does existing land-use look like, etc). All IMO of course, also the Federal gov't has done a lot to support basic research for solar on a very general level, I think it's just a difference of what scope best suits which governing body.

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