Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Getting more energy on the wires

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Want to build a power plant in the U.S.? Here are three things to know.  First, connecting a wind farm, utility-scale battery, or other big source of power to the grid means getting in line. A typical project’s wait time has increased from around two years in 2005 to four years in 2020, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  Second, the interconnection queue is a crowded place. In 2020 there were 1.44 terawatts of projects in the queue. That’s more than the U.S.’s current fleet of generation. Third, dropouts are the norm. Only 25% of projects make it to completion. Projects withdraw from the queue for lots of reasons, but wait times are a big factor. During long waits, negotiations can fall apart and rights can expire, reports Emma Penrod of Utility Dive. Why the bottleneck and long queues? Lack of transmission is the single biggest factor. We need way more of it to bring power from rural areas with rich wind and solar potential to power-hungry population centers. But NIMBYism and a complex permitting process have slowed the construction of new transmission to a glacial pace. So while congress debates permitting reform, what technologies could help us get more energy on the wires? In this episode, guest host Lara Pierpoint talks to Liza Reed, electricity transmission Research manager for climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a think tank in Washington D.C. She’s also a grid fellow at Prime Movers Lab. Lara and Liza explore ways to expand transmission capacity: Replacing steel-reinforced lines with composite-core lines to carry more energy, known in the industry as “reconductoring” High-voltage direct current lines capable of sending lots of power long distances (a common solution in China but rare in the U.S.)  Running transmission lines underground, known as “undergrounding” Building lines along existing rights of way, such as highways High temperature superconductors, which involve cooling wires down to carry more power Line monitoring technology that analyzes local weather, wind and other factors to detect which lines are cooler than expected, allowing grid operators to send extra power through them Improving grid studies that determine what kinds of upgrades are needed for interconnection  Federal permitting reform, which might allow more new transmission to be built Resources: Utility Dive: Why the energy transition broke the U.S. interconnection system Volts Podcast: Transmission month: everything in one place Canary Media: Manchin’s permitting-reform bill splits Dems, pro-renewables groups Canary Media: New software can find more room for clean energy on transmission grids Canary Media: FERC has a new plan to connect clean energy to the grid more quickly Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15. Register here.

from the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. I'm Lyra Pierpoint, and this is Catalyst. One of the challenges of transmission is how hard it is to get new technologies on our grid. All the systems that I'm talking about are being used in other countries. We just haven't been using the United States yet. It seems like transmission in the U.S. just keeps fizzling out. We know we need more of it, but we can't seem to get past some of the massive barriers, like local and state nimbism, federal permitting problems, technology that hasn't fundamentally

changed in decades. But there's new technology in the pipeline and new policies under consideration, and this could lead to some breakthroughs. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts.

Learn more at energy hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy, and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Laura Peerpoint, filling in for Shale Con while he's out this week.

I'm the CEO of Actuate Climate. It's a nonprofit focused on systems innovation to scale greenhouse gas and transmission's reductions. Transmission is possibly one of my favorite climate technologies because it has it all. It hasn't changed much in decades. It works on some serious physics that takes a lot of effort to understand. It's been dramatically underappreciated. And it's finally starting to get some of the attention it deserves. I recently stumbled across an Atlantic article by Robinson Meyer and it has the perfect title. The title is, unfortunately, I care about power lines now. It's a great article that I recommend and I think it sums up some of the ethos of the the entire climate tech community. We need more transmission to support renewables and electrification, but this is also about keeping the lights on and keeping people alive. And we saw this in moments of extreme stress over the last few years, from heat in California to freezing temperatures in Texas. Both of those examples show the value of having transmission interconnections that allow power to be shared across big distances. So how do we build it? In the U.S., we have about 640,000 miles of high-voltage

transmission lines. Most of these were built in the 50s and 60s, and most of them are operating at full capacity. Last year, we built a grand 386 miles of new line, and our record for the last decade was building just over 3,500 miles in 2013. Meanwhile, the National Academies estimates that to get to net zero, we need 120,000 gigawatt miles. This means new big transmission lines by 2030. At our current building rates, we'll overshoot our net zero goals by 10. decades. Clearly something has got to change. Today I'm talking to Liza Reid from the Niskenen Center about exactly that. If you're wondering whether the answer is new technology, better policy, or permitting reform, it's all of the above. Here's my conversation with Liza. It is so awesome to have you

here today to talk about transmission. I'm really excited for this conversation. Thanks, Laura. I'm excited to be here. So I have to tell you a story, which is that when I first started at the Department of Energy ages ago. One of the first things I did was go down to the Office of Electricity, and we were talking about some of the work that they were doing down there and these really cool projects on storage, on resilience. And I said, where are all the cool projects where you're investing in new transmission technologies? And this guy who is super famous and like, you know, really established in this field looked at me like I had three heads and basically was like, what do you mean new technology? Like, this isn't the space where we do new technology. And of course,

that has changed dramatically in the many years since then. So I'm really excited to dig into that today. Now, that's exactly right. And I love that story that you were already asking about transmission. You were ahead of the curve. You knew. You knew that this is what we needed. Exactly. It's perfect. And expecting and hoping. But let's start by talking about transmission as it exists today. So really, what does our transmission grid look like here in the United States? And we'll talk about this a bit globally, too. Let's talk about kind of how it works, what it does, and then we'll get into the technologies that we're currently relying on. Yeah, absolutely. So our transmission system broadly, it's moving bulk power, right? So the electricity lines that you see sort of in your neighborhood,

if they're not buried, you know, any overhead lines that we see sort of locally are usually distribution lines, right? So that's a lower voltage. And I don't want to dive too much into the technical here, but transmission are sort of the bigger lines that are moving more power. So these are often between cities and from generation to load. So from where the power is being generated, like the power plant, the solar farm, the wind farm, to sort of just to like outside the city, right? And that's the transmission system. And then distribution is what gets it sort of to everybody's home and building, et cetera. So that's sort of the broad definition of transmission. And even within transmission, there's a couple of different buckets. And usually going back to

voltage, they're bucketed by their voltage, which is loosely how big they are too, right? So like literally how tall the tower is, but then also that's a reflection of how much power they can move. So you want to move a lot of power, long distances, you need higher voltage, you need those bigger lines because they're much more efficient. So we've got about 400,000, just over 400,000 miles of transmission lines in this country, and most of them are lower voltage. So they're still like fairly local in terms of how far they can move power. I think it's two-thirds of them. actually three quarters of them are less than 300 kilovolts. And only 25% of them are that high power, high capacity that can really move things long distances.

Great. Okay. So that's what we've got. We've got this super highway of transmission lines all across the country. And how does this look globally? Do we see pretty much the same kind of thing where you have big developed grids in other countries? Yeah. So, I mean, Europe has a similar sort of developed grid as we do.

And they are looking at similar challenges that the U.S. having and how they're sharing power and how they're integrating renewable resources, which require more of those long-distance, bigger capacity lines. China had a massive build-out of transmission, going back to technology. Most of our grid, almost all of our grid, is alternating current. That's the AC I was referring to. In most grids around the world, our AC, China did a massive DC build-out over the past couple of decades. So they have these huge, multiple hundreds of mile DC lines, moving power across different parts of the country and even interconnecting with each other. So there's sort of the major kind of developed grids in terms of the technology and issues that

we're talking about today. That's great. Okay. And just to kind of parse for our listeners here, AC alternating current, DC direct current, got a little bit of DC in the world, a lot of AC here in the United States. Can you explain what the differences are among those two basic technologies? We'll get into more of the details later. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So AC is, AC is the sine waves. If anybody remembers their physics classes, right, AC, the alternating current is its alternating, right? It's going up and it's going down. It's a fascinating complex physics process. And DC is direct current, so it's not alternating at all. It is staying the same at all times. Functionally, what it means for the grid is that DC power

can move longer distances more easily. So that alternating current create some flow issues, but when you know exactly sort of what the current and what the voltage are going to be all the time like you have in DC, you can move more power, longer distances, a lot easier. So you get much higher capacity in a direct current system, but it's newer in the history of electricity transmission. We're looking at 140 years that we've had high voltage alternating current solutions. We haven't had direct current for that long, So the reason that Tamas Edison didn't succeed with a direct current grid is that he couldn't get sort of the high voltage opportunities, that lower loss system that didn't come around until the 1940s, right? And then a new technology in the 70s and then the newest technology in the 2000s, 2020s.

So much slower development process for direct current than we've had for alternating current. Okay, so transmission technology. We've got alternating current and direct current. Let's talk a little bit about the functional just physical wires themselves and what they're made out of. Can you say a little bit about that? You know, what's actually inside the cable? What's outside? What is it that we're looking at when we look up at our really cool transmission lines that we're always trying to seek out wherever we are?

Yeah. When you're looking at these transmission lines, mostly what you're looking at is aluminum. It's a whole lot of aluminum. Copper is the most conductive of the metals. Aluminum is less conductive than copper, but it's a lot lighter and it's a lot cheaper. Right. And so quickly that math worked out, that sort of economics worked out, that it makes far more sense to be making these lines out of aluminum. So there's a couple of different sort of traditional kinds of electricity transmission lines.

ACSR is kind of the default, and that stands for aluminum conductor steel reinforced. And so there's steel down the middle, right? And the core is this piece of steel, and then these aluminum wires, wrap. around that steel core. And the importance of that steel core is that it is the structure of the line. The aluminum is moving the power back and forth, but the steel is what's keeping that line in place. As electricity flows through a line, it heats up. And that heat causes the aluminum to expand, right? So you've got this hot aluminum, and what happens is the line physically sags, right? There's just so much expansion from the heat. The steel is essential. That core component of every transmission line is

essential to limiting that sag and kind of maintaining the integrity of the line, right? So that the aluminum is just moving the electrons again, and the steel is providing the strength. That's a traditional sort of, as I said, base transmission line is this ACSR, aluminum conductor steel reinforced. There's very cool new core technologies. We've got more than steel. We've got things that are stronger than steel now, right? And so aluminum conductor composite core is another option where you're looking at some new materials, some composite materials that are providing that strength in the transmission line. And as a result, you can send way more power down the line because the aluminum can get hotter and that core can support even more sag, right? It's not,

it's not running into the same barriers that steal it. You've just got a much stronger core. And so that's one of the kind of opportunities that we have as we build a new transmission is to build it with better materials and be able to move more power along sort of the same corridors and the same lines. Right. Well, that makes a lot of sense. And of course, this isn't even just about more power, right? It's also about the fact that as climate change is happening, we're getting hotter and hotter days, which also helped to heat up the lines and increase. sag. And as we know well here in California, if you get a lot of sagging lines that ultimately start falling, that can be a pretty major source of wildfires. Yeah, that's exactly right.

And the heat, I mean, it's so interesting that the environment of the transmission line, just like you said, impacts how much power it can send. Right? Because if you're already sagging just from the ambient temperature, you can't send that much more power. Right. So all the ways that we can figure out how to send more power and less sag is essential. Okay. Great. Well, so we're going to talk a bit more in a second about kind of the future of individual transmission line technologies. But right now, let's start at kind of the big systems level. So you described, you know, we have the big bulk power transmission system. I like to think of it as like big huge generators and big huge lines that take all of that power to major load centers where then they go across a whole bunch of distribution lines. And, of course, in the United States, we've got basically three main electrical grids. We've got the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and then Texas as its own special flower. So one of the big things that we talk about a lot in transmission and in technology are interconnects.

And so those are places where you're sort of tying the grid together, whether it's a generation resource tying it onto the grid or maybe tying across some of those big interconnects. So let's start by talking a little bit about that. So interconnects across the big grids, how many are there? Why do we have them there? How are they helpful? Yeah, there are some. They should be a lot bigger.

In fact, we recently did a data analysis. to show sort of how the grids are interconnected and illustrate that compared to the amount of energy that the grids are using, these interconnects are just incredibly small, right? They really haven't grown over time. So why they're helpful. And when we think about the eastern and the western interconnect, that is a huge span of miles, right, across the United States. And maintaining an electrical system, right, that sinusoid across those thousands of miles is actually a very difficult stability. problem, right? That you have this whole time delay and you have issues with maintaining that integrity. And so instead, the east and the west are stitched together with what's called back-to-back, high-voltage, direct current lines. So they're not even lines, right? They're actually stations,

right? They convert the Western interconnect from AC to D.C., then convert it right back to AC again to transfer power between the East and the West. So there's a handful of these sort of down that eastern and western interconnection seem, as you were saying, that move power back and forth. And then ERCOT is incredibly isolated. So there's one or two. Ercot has some minimal back-to-back and some minimal AC at sort of very low voltage, but incredibly isolated. I think less than 1% of their load or something is available via transmission. Could be supported by external transmission capacity. So the reason that these interconnects are so important is to support your load, right? I mean, in an ideal world, you're able to supply all the power that you need from your own footprint,

but we've got diverse energy resources in the United States. And if you really want to pursue least cost energy for everybody, then we want to be opening up those markets, right, giving everybody access to all of the low-cost energy resources that we have in the U.S. And the only way to do that is to electrically connect them, right? And these interconnections allow for that flow back and forth so that when one area is experiencing greater electrical need, you know, they can be supported by their neighboring areas. Right. Well, so let's talk about Texas for a second, because as you mentioned, Texas kind of bucks that trend. And so they've got their own grid with relatively few interconnects. And there's some good reasons why they chose that, right? I think they really, you know, as I understand it, the fact that they don't interconnect across state lines

effectively means that they get to regulate their own grid, and they're not subject to nearly as much federal jurisdiction as kind of the rest of the grid is, which means they can do some really cool things with their market, and they've been able to support a lot of renewables expansion. There's some really interesting things that Texas does that a lot of the other system operators are actually thinking about modeling in the future. So, you know, some advantages to what they've done with their grid for sure, but also some disadvantages. And so I think we have to talk for a second about what happened a couple years ago during that winter cold snap when really they had some trouble getting electricity on their home

grid, right? And a lot of folks lost power during a time when they really needed heat. So can you say a bit about kind of the disadvantages of not interconnecting and how that discussion is currently playing out in Texas? Like, is there more, are there more calls for Texas to actually think about interconnecting with the rest of the country's grids? Yeah. So you did a great job, sort of explaining why Urquod has separated itself. Because what you said is exactly right. It is not completely devoid of federal oversight, right? There is some, but it is able to kind of limit that oversight and have some independence

and how they make their decisions. But there are downsides, which is that lack of interconnection means lack of support, right? Like you can't help out your friends and neighbors, and your friends and neighbors can't help you out. So Texas was hit by Winterstorm Uri in February 2021. right, incredibly cold temperatures. And there were many different impacts on the grid and on the generation supply. And a lot of the natural gas wasn't able to provide power. So Texas has a lot of diversity even within their own footprint. As you said, they've got natural gas, but they've had

a ton of renewable energy buildout in the last two decades as well. So nearly all of the energy generation sources were unable to meet their expected capacity, right? They're expected generation capacity. So there's just huge shortfall, where you're not getting the energy generation that's necessary to run the grid, and there's an incredible energy demand, right? I mean, it is cold, and people are doing what they can to stay warm, and that requires a lot more energy resources. There was a big gap in natural gas because there was issues with sort of freezing of the systems and even being able to transport the natural gas. So Texas was left in a real energy crunch, and they were stuck.

Right? So normally what happens in sort of an extreme weather situation is that you prepare for rolling blackouts. And the whole point of rolling blackouts, at the risk of being glib, is that they roll. Right. So I get a blackout for a period of time, and then you get a blackout for a period of time. And then someone else gets a blackout for a period of time, right? So it's supposed to shift so that nobody is without power for long periods of time. or days, and it's much easier to survive when you have, you know, you know that your fridge

can stay cool, right, some number of hours, or you can heat your house, right? Well, what happened in Texas is that they had so little energy that they couldn't roll the blackouts, right? So the intention was to be able to roll, but they had to shut, in fact, many more circuits off than you would want to, and they couldn't turn them back on because there wasn't energy to turn those circuits back on. There was also kind of an interesting. challenge here with how much insight, and this sort of bleeds into what I'm sure we'll talk about later, but how much insight we have into grid control, right, that they didn't want to shut off a hospital. And so the entire system next to a hospital got to maintain their energy, right? If you can

isolate different parts of the grid, then again, you can roll those blackouts instead of everyone who lives next to a hospital having power and everyone not living next to a hospital not having power. So they weren't able to roll these blackouts, and they weren't able to bring in energy. And I think it's really important to look at what was happening on the other grids. So the states to the north and the states to the northeast were also experiencing extreme weather, right? It was not exclusive to Texas. And even the parts of Texas that were not run by ERCOT, especially, right, were experiencing this extreme weather, but did not have this massive multi-day blackout problem because they had so much more power available and were able to share. share it. So if you look at, there's some really interesting maps out there that show how the

power moved, right? Like how much the sort of mid-Atlantic states were selling power to the Midwest states and how much the Midwest states were sending power to the Great Plains states. And so they were able to roll those blackouts, right? Directly to the north of Texas, there were blackouts. They still had an energy gap, but they were able to roll them, right? And so they didn't see the, you know, billions in economic damage and they didn't see the deaths, quite frankly. I mean, over a hundred people died in Texas as a result of their inability to get more power on the grid. Right. Well, and this sounds like this is going to become increasingly important as climate change, you know, means that we need to be more resilient. And also hopefully, you know, as we start to rely on renewable power, where there's

going to be really big differences in the availability of resources. So does that mean that we're going to see a whole lot of additional interconnects popping up, at least, you know, across the eastern and Western Interconnect and with Mexico and Canada, or is that TBD? That's my desire. That's what I like to see what you see happen. And there's a lot of developers who want to see that happen as well, right? Because it goes to the market access question. It goes to resilience and reliability, right?

There's all these reasons that that is incredibly valuable, and we absolutely should be pushing for that. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission just had a task force. So they, all year, for the past 12 months, they've been doing this really interesting. Task Force with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, those five commissioners, and then 10 commissioners from NARUC, so they're state-level commissioners from the National Association of Regulated Utility Commissioners. And they had a whole session in July talking about this inter-regional transmission, because it's not even just the three grids that you mentioned, right?

The way that our grid is actually managed is even smaller grids within that. And so, yeah, I was saying earlier those great planes. states, right, are largely under one sort of grid operator and then the Midwest or the mid-continent, because it technically goes all the way down south to Louisiana, right? That's another grid operator, the mid-Atlantic states. All of these grid operators also have really different abilities to transfer power between each other. And so we really do need to see so much more transmission connecting these regions, not just the east and west and Texas, but all the grids in between. It's absolutely essential, but getting the policies in place is actually one of the

challenges for moving that forward. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture, from near real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators, grid operators, or leadership ask, did it deliver? Easy enrollment creates momentum, proven performance builds trust. That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices

delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at energy hub.com. We're living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it. Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories, data centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital, as I talk with people deploying capital,

shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how in incentives are structured and how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, then the other kind of grid interconnection that we often talk about is when we get big new generation on the grid, right? Because there's a specific interconnection and kind of a tie you have to make there. So let's talk about that, because we need a lot more clean power. A lot of that's going to be, you know, variable renewables. So what does it look like to try to get that interconnected? I know that, you know, I've heard

for example, about there being really long queues to do interconnects for new power. So why is that the case? And are there any new technologies that can kind of help move us along in terms of interconnecting new power when we need it? Yeah, absolutely. There's more than, I want to say there's more than a terawatt of energy generation in these cues across the United States that aren't able to come online because we don't have the necessary transmission to support them.

So what happens is if you're a generator and you're a generator and you're, want to add yourself to the grid. There's an application process, right? You raise your hand and you say, please, please can I be added to the grid? And the grid operator does an analysis, or at least is supposed to do an analysis of what impacts that generation being added exactly where it wants to be added is going to have on power flow. And then if there's impacts that could make the power that could cause problems in the existing power flow, and they need to add more transmission, then that transmission needs to be kind of identified and built so that this generation capacity can be added. And that seems pretty straightforward, but it has gotten very complex.

And so those cues, you know, were used to be a couple of years and now are two, are four years or longer, just to get out of the queue. And so you have a lot of projects dropping out of the queue. and there's this sort of frustrating incentive to get in the queue because you know it's going to take four years. And so there's this other issue of is everybody in the queue a project that's actually going to get to completion, right? Or are they just holding a place in the queue? Well, it's hard to tell anymore, right? If it's four years until you can get your interconnection, have you dropped out because you were just a placeholder that couldn't turn into a project? Or have you dropped out because this was too long, right?

and you couldn't line up all the capital and sort of maintain everything to get connected. So these interconnection issues are a huge problem, and the lack of transmission is one of the issues. We need more transmission to move more power around from more and different places than we have historically. We used to just move coal on trains to coal plants, right? And we could move natural gas on natural gas pipelines

to natural gas plants. But now we need to move the transmission we need to move the power from where it is via electrons, right? That's got to be a transmission line. So we need more transmission built so that we can get all this power interconnected. As far as technology, absolutely. There's really just kind of some fascinating technologies that we could and should be using to get more clean energy onto our grid.

And these will help with more transmission generally, right? So there's a range, right? So there's some technologies that help us use our transmission. better, right, so we can get more effective use of our existing grid so that we can get more generation faster, right, quicker than it takes to build a new transmission line, and then there's technologies that just make our trans, that make new transmission lines better, right? So there's both of them. On the, all the way back on the study side, before you even get into the technology itself,

there's technologies that make, there's like software that makes the study itself better, right, that sort of automates, that they've often been manual studies. And that really works for natural gas plants, right? For example, but if you're trying to model a variable energy resource like wind or solar, those manual systems, you know, can't always capture the dynamics in the same way. I was talking to one of these technology companies, Pearl Street, that has found a way to automate some of these studies. so if there's an error, they sort of can tweak more parameters and figure out, like,

was this error because there's a transmission problem, or was this error because our software isn't used to dealing with variable renewable energy resources? And, like, that is a problem that we need to fix. Like, if the software can't handle the generation types that we have, then we need better software, right? So that's one that I think is, like, fascinating and almost depressing, right? That, like, that's... something we're trying to fix is just getting the studies done faster because of sort of the old archaic assumptions in how we think about transmission systems. But then there's also hardware solutions. So there's a couple of different ways that we can use our existing transmission

system better. One of these, you know, we talked about how the heat of the heat of the day can minimize the amount of transmission that power you can send via transmission. While there's a company called line vision. There's a couple of different companies, but one of them is line vision that senses essentially the microclimate, right? So instead of calling your weather person, your meteorologist, to figure out how much power you can send, at a line by line basis, you know what's the temperature, what's the wind even, right? So you can sort of override that bulk analysis of how much power you can send and say, oh, actually, I know that this line can take more power. When it comes to interconnection cues itself, there's ways to manage the power flow

in our transmission system. So the way that power flows is the way that everything flows, least resistance. Electrons go wherever they can as easily as they can. But there's ways that you can change that. So there's technologies like smart wires develops these flexible, alternating current transmission systems. They're fax devices. And they basically, for all intents and changes the resistance of a line. Very technically, for the folks who are listening who care about this, right, you're changing inductance and capacitance. You're changing different parameters of the line. It's not technically resistance. But it makes it harder for the electrons to flow in one way. And so they automatically route themselves to another way. This is a pretty straightforward way to

not only use our existing lines better, but get more generation on the system, right? Because if the default flow shows that we need transmission in different places, but that's going to take a couple of years to build, well, just use this fax device, right, to move it around as needed when needed. So those are a couple of technologies that make it, that should make it easier if we deploy them more and more effectively to move power around the grid and get more interconnected. There's a question of new technologies for new transmission. So there's the lines I was talking about, right, where you can use these kind of composite cores, so you can move more power. So instead of maybe a couple of new transmission lines, maybe you just need one, or even reconductoring with those. So it's

a lot faster to add capacity to the grid by just taking out old steel reinforced lines and replacing them with composite reinforced lines. You can get multiple times the capacity, I think 2x is the number that I hear most, here quoted the most. And you're not even building anything new, right? You're just replacing the line with something that can carry more. So that's one option. You can use that in rebuilding lines or building new lines. And then, of course, HVDC, right? That's my favorite technology. I wrote a whole dissertation on that technology because you could move more power, as I already said, sort of longer distances, but HVDC is also more controllable, right? Because it's that direct current, right? It's the stable current and flatline current and voltage.

You don't have to control a sinusoid and worry about stability. You can do what's called dispatching power, right? You can sort of move it exactly where you want it to go. And that's a lot more effective way to manage our transmission system as well. This is awesome. So I think in one full swoop you've described technologies to help us use our existing transmission grid in a better way and some of the technologies that we need to build new transmission and have sufficiently dispelled the notion that there's nothing new technology-wise in transmission. It sounds like there is a lot that's new and that's so great. Yeah, that's absolutely right.

And what's also like a little important to remember here is that there's also like this new to who question. Because one of the challenges of transmission is how hard it is to get new technologies on our grid. All the systems that I'm talking about are being used in other countries. we just haven't been using them in the United States yet. And I just think that's important to emphasize, right, that these probably existed when you were down at the Office of Electricity asking what we could be doing. And we weren't looking at them then and we're only slowly looking at them now.

Right. And so why is that that other countries are farther ahead? Is it because they're new regions where they're building out their grid and they're kind of starting fresher than we are? Or is there some other reason that they've been more focused on these kinds of technologies? There's a couple of different reasons. And part of it is just complex politics. But if you think about Europe is using a lot more of these, like the fax devices I was saying, right, to control sort of where power flows on the grid. The U.S. has had a lot of sort of benefits of energy diversity. And they've also had the benefits of land to build transmission lines on. And so the idea of having to maximize our existing transmission system hasn't been a salient in the past.

as it is now. We've had other ways of moving energy around, and we've quite frankly had more land to move things around. So that's one of the pieces. The other is a bit of an incentive structure issue, so I don't want to dive too much into utility regulation today, but you can get a rate of return on new capital expenditures, which is new transmission lines. But you don't get that same benefit as an investor-owned utility for just maximizing what you're you. You're you already have in your system, right, in most places, right? And so other countries have looked at different ways of incentivizing using the existing infrastructure that you already have and how to make that attractive from an investment perspective. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One of my

great frustrations in my previous life as a utility was that at the time, you know, we could make investments in anything that was a hardware-related expense, but something that was like software as a service was not treated the same way. You couldn't make money the same way on it. And it was sort of like, seems like a very 19th century approach to doing things. But it's okay. We're working on it. We're getting through these things. Okay, so that's really great. Let's talk a bit about some of the additional new technologies that are out there. So first of all, medium voltage DC. You've talked a little bit about high voltage DC, but what's going on with the medium voltage world? Why is that something that folks are talking about these days? Yeah, medium voltage is very much in the sort of academic space,

but I think we're going to see it moving more into the grid space, right, where medium voltage is lower than high voltage, it's higher than low voltage. It's like the Goldilocks of voltages. And it's probably going to be at that transmission distribution interface is where we might see that medium voltage DC or even within the distribution system. And going back to what I said about high voltage, right, DC is more control. And so putting more kind of easily controllable links and lines at that interface and even within the distribution system is going to be, I think, a real opportunity in the coming decades. You know, we don't have those systems right now. For the most part, there's a cost question, right?

We're still figuring out high voltage DC and the cost effectiveness of that and getting used to building it. We've got a lot of low voltage DC. I'm talking on one right now. Right. We've got low voltage DC everywhere. And that's why, even though we're not seeing a lot of movement yet in implementing medium voltage DC, I think on the horizon, that could be something we see because it just sort of naturally connects the two pairs. Okay. Got it. So, okay, and again, we're really talking about transmission. You know, the goals here are to basically enable new kinds of generation to come onto the grid, clean sources of generation in addition to obviously making sure that our grid stays super reliable. So continuing into the technologies that help us do that, So we talk a lot about non-wires alternatives within the utility business. So that, I think, is a really generic class of things that you can do that are not build a transmission line. But do you have more to say about some of the technologies involved in non-wheres alternatives that we haven't covered so far? I mean, I think I'll add that there's a whole host of them. I've only named a couple.

But there's a whole host of companies working in this non-wires alternative space. There's even sort of topology management, which is even further back than control. controlling an individual line, where you're looking at how power is getting dispatched and looking at patterns and figuring out different ways to maximize dispatch across the transmission system. So there's lots of different levels at which these non-wires alternatives can be used and should be used. I think it's important to also recognize how much more transmission we need, right?

So it sometimes can seem like we're at odds with each other, the non-wires alternatives versus transmission, but you'll never find a transmission advocate who says we don't need non-wire's alternatives. We're absolutely for all of it, right? But the scale that we need to decarbonize the electricity system means we need to get twice as much transmission capacity or more in the coming decades. So that's going to be a lot of new transmission and then hopefully a lot of ways to better use the transmission that we have and that we're adding.

Right. That makes sense. I know a lot, you know, again, in the utility world, we would talk about non-wards alternatives, as a way to help you defer the need for different kinds of infrastructure investments. It doesn't mean that you never have to build that transmission line or that substation, but it can really enable you to take some more time to figure out your needs to save up money to do what you need to do a little bit later down the road, which is hugely valuable, particularly with these four to five-year queue interconnection times, right?

That's right. That's exactly right. And when we think about deferring, right, it can get the clean energy on the grid, and it takes a long time to build a transmission line right now. Right. So it's also not even necessarily deferring anymore. It's filling in while we're waiting for the new transmission line to come on. Okay, great. So a couple of other approaches. Again, getting at the challenge that it's really hard to build a transmission line. One is undergrounding. And as we were talking about this, I was like, wait, really, people are talking about undergrounding bolt transmission lines? And you tell me, yes, really. So tell me more about this. It seems like a really expensive way to go. But what's the benefit? Where are we talking about doing this? We could do it lots of different places. So most recently there was a study, NextGen Highways, did a study in Minnesota for the Minnesota Department of Transportation specifically looking at undergrounding along highways, right? Because we've already got that right of way, right?

And the land has already been disturbed. So there's lots of kind of policy reasons and anti-NIMBY reasons, right, that you're upsetting fewer people or possibly no people, ideally, right, if you can underground along highways. we already underground a lot of electricity in the U.S. It's just mostly distribution. A lot of cities have underground distribution systems. Transmission is becoming more feasible to underground because of the advances that we have in high-voltage direct current.

So the newest HVDC technology, again, it's only a couple decades old, so it's like a baby, according to the United States' perspective on electricity technology. But that technology is a lot easier to interface with the AC grid. So it's called voltage source conversion. It's transistor-based, again, for folks who are interested in that level of detail. But it's easier to interface with the AC grid so you can think about putting DC in more places. The reason DC is important is that, going back to physics, undergrounding AC is actually incredibly difficult. You can only go 40 to 100 miles, kind of depending on how much, how you design the system and how you

you want to control it, because the ground itself actually creates stability issues for moving AC power. DC doesn't have this problem. But when DC was sort of incredibly expensive and difficult to integrate into the AC grid, you're only looking at spur lines from, you know, a dam right into a city. And so you had to worry less about undergrounding. As we try to expand transmission and get more transmission and potentially like a nation-spanning macro grid, If we can get interconnected high voltage direct current lines across the country to move power back and forth, you know, that you can think differently about transmission.

You can think differently about DC. So DC can move a ton more power on the same right-of-way. If you underground, for example, in a highway, you're now not requiring new right-of-way. You're using your existing right-of-way. You're moving a ton of power. And so there's some estimates out there that, that you might actually be closer to parity, as opposed to the sort of 5 to 10x that's normally cited. It could be closer to 1 to 2x if you think about power over distance.

So mile by mile, you're more expensive. But gigawatt mile by gigawatt mile, you might actually be a lot closer to parity. Now, it's still to be determined if that's the case. We have to build this stuff to figure it out. And quite frankly, I think we should. I think we should just fund some test lines to figure out how difficult is this to underground. But certainly, you know, Europe is looking at undergrounding for similar reasons that they've had to maximize their existing transmission system. We underground lots of things in this country.

We underground lots of other infrastructure. And so figuring out what it would take for electricity transmission and where it would best fit is actually a burgeoning conversation, if you will, because then you don't have to see the tall towers too. There's lots of benefits, and figuring out that cost equation is going to be essential for actually seeing if we can realize this opportunity. Yeah, so it sounds like a little more expensive to build, but potentially some huge benefits. But what about the OPEX? Is the OPEX going to be a lot more expensive? I mean, it seems like if something goes wrong underground, it's a lot harder to detect and fix it. Is that something that folks are concerned about or not as much? Well, I mean, when it comes to underground, if folks are concerned about everything.

You can find someone as opposed to every part of it. The operations is really, it's an interesting question. You know, we have fiber optics now, right, that in theory you should, right, if you're underground and you should be installing sensors that can tell you exactly where the problem is, right? And the way that you install, you know, you're raising really good questions for how we think about what levers we need to pull to minimize that cost, right? Because you also want to install it in a way that you can access it, right?

And so you can install sort of vaults. along the way, and this is another reason that highways can be really convenient for this, right? Highways have lots of on and off ramps. You basically want on and off ramps for operations and maintenance. But the way we install it and the way we're able to sense it is going to be essential to figuring out what those operations costs are and keeping them down. But you're right. Historically, that has been a problem, that getting an underground line, if there's an issue back online, has taken a lot longer than an overhead line. But we've got new technologies.

It, again, goes into that question of what are we investing in and how are we designing it to make that realizable. Awesome. Okay. Well, so, and now we get to the moment that everyone's been waiting for or we get to talk about high-temperature superconductors. So this, in my view, is like the cool, oh, my God, I'm going to do a pun here. It's going to be great, everybody.

The coolest of the cool new technology. And not just because we get to talk a little bit about liquid nitrogen. But, okay, can you say a bit about what is a high-temperature superconductor? conductor, why we don't have them already as part of our grid and what's changing that they might actually become relevant in this new world of transmission? Sure. So high-temperature superconductors, and I'm going to get my numbers wrong here, but it's high temperature on a Kelvin scale, right?

So your pun was perfect because it's still incredibly cold. It's not high temperature to the rest of us. And one of the reasons that we haven't had it is that, I mean, high-temperature superconductors are their own sort of developing industry, right? and getting up to the temperatures that we've been able to get up to is a huge breakthrough. So, yeah, so high-temperature superconductors, get rid of all those heat problems. You can send so much energy, right? They're superconducting and they're not sagging, right?

They can send a lot of power anyway, but then you also don't have this sort of safety problem that you have. You can just send an extraordinary amount of power down an HTS line. So there's a company, VIR is one of the companies that's looking at developing and deploying, well, developing and demonstrating and then deploying this technology. So superconductors, you know, when we think about power, power is voltage and current. So the benefit of a high-temperature superconductor is you can jack up that current without having to jack up the voltage, and you can still get a lot of power. The reason this matters is that voltage is what determines the height of those towers.

The reason that we use high voltage is that current is where the losses are. Current is where the heat happens, right? So you want to have as low current as possible and as high voltage as possible using our existing conductors. But with that high-temperature superconductor, sky's the limit, right? Just pump all the current you can through a much shorter tower. You're taking up less land, right? You're upsetting fewer people's viewshed, and you're just moving so much more power. I mean, this sounds super cool.

I remember Veer talking about the promise of basically, you know, a standard distribution line that runs down a street, or at least that's what it would look like, but it would be carrying the same amount of power as one of these big high-voltage transmission lines, which just struck me as so cool from the perspective of actually being able to get this stuff permitted and built, given the difference in the NIMBY issues you confront. So really exciting stuff. But same question about operating costs. If you've got, I mean, keeping these lines cool is no joke, right? Because we are talking about still very cold temperate. So any thoughts on whether that's really going to create some challenges from the operational,

you know, sort of cost of maintenance when you're adding cooling systems to the existing transmission lines? I mean, that's another case of we've just got to see, right? I'm a big believer in innovation, right? That we got to do the demonstration, figure out what the opportunities are, and then figure out how to pull those levers down from a maintenance perspective. One thing that's cool about VIR is that they're overhead lines, right? So normal, when we think, or I don't know if when I say, say normally when we think of superconductors, I don't know how normally people are thinking of

superconductors. People were imagining like encased an underground, right? And so you had all of your undergrounding problems, plus all of your superconducting problems. It's potentially different if you have an overhead line, right? And that's kind of a very cool innovation in the way that they're encasing those conductors so that they can still be overhead, which is, again, not to dis-undergrounding, because I think there's tremendous opportunity there, but handle one set of challenges at a time, you know? That makes total sense. Okay. So we're getting towards the end here, and there's an entire conversation that we could have. We could probably

redo this whole thing and talk about distribution systems. So I don't think we're going to have time to get into that deeply today. But I did want to just raise one thing, which is that we've talked a lot about needing new transmission in order to bring new clean generation onto the grid. But there's another whole element to all of this, which is electrification, right? And particularly now that we've passed the Inflation Reduction Act with a lot of tax incentives, that hopefully are going to spur electric vehicle adoption, and in addition to getting us to, you know, additional heat pumps, lots of new uses for electricity.

I just want to ask one thing, which is that, you know, the technologies we've talked about today are going to help us move clean power in order to support all these additional uses. But is there anything else that we've missed today that you think is a really important piece of the puzzle when it comes to supporting additional uses of electricity

at the far end of the line? Yeah, you know, I think going back to what I said about non-wires, that transmission is not a, is not an enemy to non-wire's alternatives, also not an enemy to local generation, right? So distributed energy resources are an absolutely essential part of that future, right? And getting, and it's not just rooftop solar, rooftop solar is just the easy phrase to use, right? But there's a whole variety of distributed energy resources, right? That there's utility scale and there's more local and community scale. And, you know, energy storage is going to be essential, again, up and down, that size of home and building to local to transmission scale storage.

They're all partners in the solution. So I talk about transmission because that's kind of my passion area and my expertise area. But that distribution level ability to kind of decarbonize locally is going to be essential to for getting the clean energy future and also providing that resilience. There's some really interesting stories out of. Florida, I think it was, after the hurricane, right, where solar and storage were being brought in to kind of support, like, local, you know, local microgrids, essentially, because it's also hard to bring diesel in, right?

Like, diesel generators in a post-hurricane are difficult to keep getting diesel fuel in, right? And so there's a really interesting story that I was reading about that, that the solar storage, or even just solar, minimize the amount of diesel you had to use. So it's not quite a completely independent system yet, but it's a lot cleaner and it can last a lot longer from a resilience perspective when you can partner sort of all these things together kind of on the journey. So I have no illusions that transmission is our only solution, but it's an absolutely essential part of kind of a giant grab bag of technologies that we need to get implemented. Right. Well, and it sounds like the concepts of figuring out the right way to really efficiently move power where it needs to go under a variety. of different circumstances is a really key one on the distribution side as well as transmission.

So that's great. Okay. One final question. Let's talk about permitting reform. So, of course, we all know that Joe Manchin introduced a permitting reform bill in Congress recently that unfortunately went by the wayside pretty darn fast. But I think there are some studies that are starting to pop up that are showing that permitting reform is really essential if we're going to meet the goals in the IRA if we're going to actually see the clean energy revolution that everyone's hoping to see after a spate of really good climate legislation lately. So tell us a bit about permitting reform. Why do we need it? What specifically is included in permitting reform and is there hope? There's always hope. I certainly think there's hope and that's not just, that's not just

rose-colored glasses. I mean, I certainly think this is open the door to an essential and ongoing conversation, and I think we're going to have it again and hopefully keep having it towards passing a permitting reform package in sort of the short term, but then also continuing those discussions. Because anything we can figure out and agree to, you know, potentially in the next weeks, I say we, like you and the powers of me, right, members of Congress can agree to in the next couple of months, I think it's still just going to be a down payment on figuring out what we need, right? There's kind of some essential pieces that folks have already identified that need and can be fixed,

and then continuing discussions around, like where are we seeing other issues and opportunities to get permitting right? So one of the ways that we talk about it in Ascanon is transmission line permitting, and particularly the siting part of it. So siting is deciding where the line is actually going to go. For natural gas infrastructure in the U.S.,

that happens at the Federal Energy Regulatory. Commission. They've had this authority for more than 80 years that pipelines used in interstate commerce are cited at the federal level, right? And that sort of seems like a natural partnership. We talked a little bit about the history of transmission, right, and that we haven't had to move power as much power as far historically, but we're starting to see, we've already been seeing for decades now, but it's really becoming like a pinch point when we think about this clean energy revolution, that transmission is running into these same issues. Transmission, has always been permitted exclusively at the state level.

There's been some very, very narrow federal authority established for it, but it's kind of this multi-step, elaborate process. There's a study, and then someone else has to review it, and then the states look at it, and then the federal government looks at it. It's never been successfully used. And so figuring out something that makes sense for transmission line citing is sort of an obvious step from our perspective, right? that there's just some lines that are interstate commerce.

There's lots of transmission lines that just make sense within a state boundary. Lots of them. Probably three quarters of them, right? Those low voltage lines that I was describing earlier, three quarters of the lines in the United States, that I think it's actually three quarters of the lines built in the last five years have been those low voltage ones. I actually think it's even more percentage of the lines in the U.S.

that are low voltage. Right, those kind of makes sense as being a state issue. but high capacity lines are moving power back and forth. We know that. We kind of have that evidence that they're in between states. They're impacting interstate commerce. And so that should be like a federal authority. So that's something that there was a version of that proposed in the permitting reform package that Senator Manchin presented.

And I'm hoping some version of that continues to be part of the conversation. Because transmission is also, as we've discussed, not just a conversation. clean energy issue, right? I mean, it is essential for that, but it's also essential for electric reliability and resilience. Just so much is changing in how we use power and how we're sort of experiencing the world around us and what that means about our power needs. That transmission is just essential for lots of different reasons. And so figuring out how we can rebalance, you know, what makes sense as a federal authority and what makes sense as a state authority, I think, is essential. And then there are other questions very much outside my

expertise area on, you know, who does what level of analysis? And, you know, what are the time windows and how do we decide when an environmental permit, for example, is enough? And is there a state-level review and a federal review? That's not necessarily my expertise at all, but it's certainly essential part of the conversation, is figuring out what is slowing things down, what is sort of essential review, and then what are things that are maybe just, barriers that we can streamline or better coordinate. Right. Yeah, I think there are a lot of huge challenges here.

I mean, I'm certainly in the camp of, you know, we sort of need to move towards a build faster strategy if we're really going to manage climate change. And at the same time, we have to reckon with the fact that from a community engagement perspective, we've done a really bad job for probably multiple centuries at this point of kind of figuring out the right way to really hear the voices that need to get heard on this. So I think this is probably one of the most important things going on right now, in my view, in the policy world, is figuring out how to strike that balance. So, but I'm so glad to hear from you that there is hope because I think that hope combined with the very cool advances being made across the technology spectrum here mean, hopefully a very bright future for transmission. So, Liza, I really appreciate you having this conversation with me.

I think this has been a lot of fun. And hopefully our listeners will eat up some of the cool tech nuggets that you've been dropping throughout the episode. So thank you so much. We really appreciate having you. Thank you so much, Laura. This was thrilling to talk about, and I agree with you. It's absolutely essential that we figure it out and we get more things built. Liza Reed is the Electricity Transmission Research Manager for Climate Policy at the Niskenen Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. She's also a grid fellow at Prime Movers Lab. What did you think? What did we miss? Let us know. Find the show on Twitter at CatalystPod.

You can find me on LinkedIn. If you like the show today, go on over to Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and a review. The show is a co-production of PostScript Media and Canary Media. You can head over to canarymedia.com for links to more information on today's episode. And as always, PostScript is supported by Prelude Ventures, a venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs to address climate change across a range of sectors, including advanced energy, food and agriculture, transportation and logistics, advanced materials and manufacturing, and advanced computers. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing by Greg Vilfrank and Sean Marquand. Our managing producer is Cecily Meza-Martinez. I'm Lyra Pierpoint, and this is Catalyst.