The US is building power lines faster, but not fast… | Canary Media

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The good news is that it’s made some serious strides toward that goal over the last two years. The bad news is it’s not nearly enough to support the enormous amounts of new wind and solar power needed to meet climate goals. So says a new report from consultancy Grid Strategies and commissioned by trade group Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG), which counts 36 high-voltage transmission projects primed to start construction across the country in the near future. That’s 14 more “ready-to-go” projects than Grid Strategies identified in a similar report in 2021 — and if they can be built, they could make significant improvements in the country’s grid reliability and clean energy needs. The 36 projects on the list include high-voltage direct-current lines to carry power from onshore wind farms in Great Plains states and offshore installations along the Atlantic coast. They also include networks of high-voltage alternating-current lines to link renewables-rich areas to population cente

TransWest, SunZia and the transmission lines connecting offshore wind farms are financed via arrangements between developers and purchasers of their power. Other projects in New York, Colorado and the Pacific Northwest were developed within single utility service territories or grid operator regions, simplifying the task of allocating costs to customers of utilities in those discrete regions. “For all those other lines hanging out there — the big ones where the beneficiaries are so dispersed — that’s the really hard kind. It’s almost like the more beneficial the line, the harder it is to…

The US is building power lines faster, but not fast… | Canary Media

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