14 ms·
HVDC transmission line to connect three ISO regions
- Animats 4y agoOnes that are close together, though. We need about four HVDC lines through the Sierras, to connect the US wind belt (the Texas panhandle north to Canada) to the West Coast. Plus lines east to Chicago and beyond.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago> Plus lines east to Chicago and beyond. https://soogreen.com/ https://soogreen.com/ https://www.eenews.net/image_assets/2019/03/image_asset_50317.jpg https://www.eenews.net/image_assets/2019/03/image_asset_5031...
- Animats 4y agoOh, good. Now if we can only get the westbound links in place. There's a New Mexico to Arizona link going in, which is nice for Phoenix but doesn't go far enough. The TransWest Express project (Wyoming to Las Vegas, which already has good westbound connections) has been in studies for a decade now.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoI wish the Inflation Reduction Act had an eye towards funding TBM ops for these projects, more expensive in the short term but bypasses lease and right of way issues, as well as environmental studies. Climate events are going to be more extreme in the future and labor will only get more expensive due to structural demographics. “Dig Once” at this scale. You’ve then got a large corridor for future infrastructure as well.
- xxpor 4y ago>Skelly is behind a previous transmission development company, Clean Line Energy, which dissolved in 2017 when a multi-state project failed to secure state regulatory approval. We desperately need the feds to take over these approvals under the interstate commerce clause. We will need a ton of transmission infrastructure over the next decade, and we can't have things being held up or denied by the states just because they happen to be in the path. See the vote in Maine over the proposed line from Canada to NY.
- readthenotes1 4y agowhy should maine suffer without adequate recompense for others?
- woodruffw 4y agoHow does Maine suffer? That's not a rhetorical question; I fail to understand how a power line hurts it.
- downvotetruth 4y agoIf there is such a need to put it through state land, then it can be paid to put it underground to not have to continually spray herbicides to keep the weeds down. But, that would cut into Avangrid's profits, and they have been known for substandard customer service & after storm line work. If they want to offer state level service, then the state should own the line. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29100131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29100131 108 comments & https://www.eenews.net/articles/embattled-maine-power-line-foreshadows-u-s-climate-obstacles/ https://www.eenews.net/articles/embattled-maine-power-line-f...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- woodruffw 4y agoI'm having trouble parsing this sentence: are you saying the federal government doesn't want to pay for the line? Or that they won't pay for some version of it?
- downvotetruth 4y agoProposal is for the Maine line to be privately owned. Outside of the Western Area Power Administration, the generation and transmission equipment is currently owned, operated and maintained by a consortium of private industrial companies called Independent System Operators or Regional Transmission Organizations (ISOs/RTOs) administered competitively under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) program of the DOE. https://www.quora.com/Does-the-government-own-all-power-lines https://www.quora.com/Does-the-government-own-all-power-line...
- jacquesm 4y agoI think HVDC is a game changer for renewables. Any long East-West grid connection is going to improve the total fraction of power that can be generated using renewables because effectively windpower = solar power and having a longer East-West stretch makes the amount of sun hours during a day longer. And any North-South lines will help offset local conditions during the day. The more the better, especially intercontinental.
- undersuit 4y agoI wanted Russia to invest in a transiberia-HVDC line and solar collectors instead of a war. They could even sell excess capacity to the countries on their southern border. I think Reddit panned this idea last time I proposed it because the longest HVDC line was only 2100 miles long.
- jacquesm 4y agoYes, that would have been a lot better than war. But it doesn't make you look strong as a dictator...
- hutzlibu 4y agoIt does, if done right. But russia does not have a solar plant industry, but they had lots of war assets sitting idle around, so they used what they had and learned to do.
- jojobas 4y agoRussia is one of the worst countries for solar power, perhaps bottom ten. It's also one the better connected ones with old school AC HV lines.
- undersuit 4y agoWind too then. I'm not picky. Hell maybe they find a coal deposit nearby the HVDC line. It wouldn't be the best but burning the coal near the location and shipping the energy else where is cheaper than shipping the coal elsewhere.
- excitom 4y agoHonest question: I understand solar panels generate DC but I thought wind turbines generate AC. Why is a DC transmission line desirable?
- Aloha 4y agoIt has nothing to do with generation. HVDC is desirable because it allows non-synchronous connection of different synchronized grids.
- pengaru 4y ago> HVDC is desirable because it allows non-synchronous connection of different synchronized grids. Primarily it's simply more efficient over long distances than AC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advantages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
- Aloha 4y agoYeah, I forgot about the higher efficiency factor.
- sephamorr 4y agoBut not in this case - It's only a 385 mile line. If it was between two synchronous grids, it would most certainly be AC for cost/tco reasons.
- upofadown 4y agoSupposedly the HVDC vs HVAC break-even distance is down to something like 600-800km now[1]. Since 385 miles works out to 620km the economics are probably not all that bad. Since it is just a link between two systems, only 2 converter stations (the expensive bit for HVDC) would be required. [1] https://www.cencepower.com/blog-posts/hvdc-transmission-systems https://www.cencepower.com/blog-posts/hvdc-transmission-syst...
- michael1999 4y ago
- braingenious 4y agoI am begging humanity to stop creating more definitions for the acronym ISO. Surely things can be described in slightly different words. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_(disambiguation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_(disambiguation)
- packetslave 4y agoISO (Independent System Operator) is a term that's been used in the energy industry for a very long time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoIt's the sort of thing we should get the International Standards Organization to look into.
- entropicgravity 4y agoFunny guy.
- bilsbie 4y agoWhat about HVDC instead?
- ianschmitz 4y agoThat’s what this article is talking about.
- bilsbie 4y agoWow I wonder if they changed the title. I swayre it said AC.
- 0xDEF 4y agoDoes transatlantic HVDC make sense? Something that connects the US/Canada with mainland Europe through Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and the UK/Norway. Transatlantic HDVC might need actively cooled superconducting transmission lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperGrid_(hydrogen) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperGrid_(hydrogen)
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoThe biggest problem with this is that the geography doesn't really make sense. A line from the east coast US to Europe goes right over Quebec which provides a large portion of the east coast's electricity through hydro already. Instead of spending billions on a trans-atlantic cable, you can just build a ton of renewables in the US and use Quebec's hydro as a giant battery.
- rgmerk 4y agoIt might be technically possible. The most ambitious project along those lines I’ve heard of is proposed from northern Australia (with lots of room for solar panels) to Singapore (which does not have a lot of room for anything). 5,000 km of HVDC undersea cable! Not guaranteed to get off the ground, but I haven’t heard any serious reservations about the technical feasibility.
- depereo 4y agoThat project recently collapsed.
- rgmerk 4y ago"Collapsed" is oversimplifying the situation. The project was a joint venture between a multibillionaire mining magnate Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest and the Atlassian cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes. For whatever reason Forrest decided that other renewable energy ventures were a better bet and stopped funding the project. Despite it entering administration, Cannon-Brookes gave it another $65 million to continue operations. https://www.businessnewsaustralia.com/articles/administrators-kick-off-sale-process-for-sun-cable.html https://www.businessnewsaustralia.com/articles/administrator... As such, I don't think this one is quite dead yet.
- swamp40 4y agoIt seems pretty clear to me that neighborhood level power grids are the way to go here. Large grids, long distance transmission and massive infrastructures are all a waste. Imagine if you could cut up a coal plant into small pieces and distribute it? Maybe a simple local neighbor grid sharing to cover a single failure. I don't think power companies can (or want to) shift their thinking to local. Are their profits lost? Government subsidies lost?
- mastax 4y agoCentralization allows massive economies of scale.
- jcranmer 4y ago> Large grids, long distance transmission and massive infrastructures are all a waste. Imagine if you could cut up a coal plant into small pieces and distribute it? Smaller infrastructure is actually more wasteful. Since you suggested a coal plant, consider the sheer number of extra jobs it would take to hire people to drive the coal truck to the neighborhood plant and handle the offloading of coal. At the scale of per-neighborhood, you might even need someone to literally shovel coal into a furnace, I don't know if the coal conveyor lines make sense at that tiny a scale. Double that because you need to transport the resulting fly ash as well. Then there's the extra instrumentation you need, the duplicate emissions mitigation points. And this is before considering the literal better efficiency of larger boilers/blowers/etc. themselves. In a concrete example I have familiarity with: I worked for a large water treatment plant that supplied water for about a million people. It required 2 engineers being present 24/7/365 to keep it running. Replace it with a water treatment plant that is 1/100th the size, and you still need 2 engineers present 24/7/365. Go much smaller than that, and the inability to economically provide on-site permanent engineer oversight leads to the idea of controlling the water treatment plant remotely via the public internet, with all of the increased risks that entails.
- mixdup 4y agoThe other half of the micro hyper-local grid is to get out of the business of needing very large plants like coal plants and moving to things like distributed wind and solar (perhaps as local as being on every rooftop in town) with battery storage That's of course easier said than done, but with things like wind/solar/battery, and small failsafe nuclear you can get to smaller grids that don't have to be so absolutely interconnected and trying to ship power from Nebraska to New York City
- plorg 4y agoA similar project to this has languished for nearly a decade, if it is even still a going concern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation
- londons_explore 4y agoHVDC can be made cheaper by making the voltage higher... As voltage goes up, the thickness of metal needed goes down. The insulator thickness goes up - that either means taller towers or thicker plastic. Conversion from regular AC grid voltages to high voltage DC was previously very expensive, with custom made semiconductors costing millions. With the advent of electric cars, there are now off the shelf cheap power electronics. They can be stacked, perhaps 20x in package to get to 10kV, and then 100x packages to get to 1 million volts. That should dramatically reduce the cost of moving large amounts of power long distances.
- nuriaion 4y agoI think that would actually be more expensive as you still have the all the hard problems. Like how do you isolate the power electronics. You can use air which is cheap but needs a lot of space. (i learned that you need 1mm per 1kV) You need a lot of space which has to be very secure. etc Additionally you need to control 5000 converters without getting oscillations etc. (probably over glas) Also they will probably need a lot more space.
- londons_explore 4y agoAt very high voltages, I would expect the whole lot to be sealed in a polymer resin for life. 1 million volts through epoxy resin requires a spacing of just 1 inch (call it two inches for a safety margin). Then your whole converter station can be the size of a shed, and the whole project can fit within existing space on existing utility land.
- xupybd 4y agoWe've had a HVDC connection in New Zealand for a long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Inter-Island https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Inter-Island
- wil421 4y agoWe’ve had it for while in the USA and Canada. Including lines built in 1932 for testing HVDC using mercury arc valves[1]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-arc_valve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-arc_valve