From the Wall Street Journal, June 6:
Bracing for an expected surge in demand for electricity, utilities adopt new tech to boost transmission capacity
The country’s aging power grid, built over the past 100 years, is about to leap into the 21st century as the Biden administration scrambles to meet a coming burst of new power demand.
To boost the grid’s capacity, the administration is pushing to step up efficiency of existing power lines with new technologies. The upgrades are far cheaper and faster than big transmission projects, which are often plagued by red tape and can take years to build.
In New York, Algonquin Power won a $42.9 million grant to install devices that automatically redeploy power when lines are overloaded. Virginia’s Dominion Energy won $33.7 million for a project that includes devices that will let it adjust power distribution in response to changing conditions on the grid. The funds are part of a $3.5 billion program for grid-boosting projects the Energy Department rolled out in October.
“We actually need stuff that can cook right now, right away, very very quickly, and the way to do that is by deploying grid-enhancing technologies,” said Ali Zaidi, the White House’s national climate adviser, at an event in Washington, D.C., last week.
Zaidi made the remarks the same day the Biden administration launched a push with 21 states, including California, Michigan and New York, to step up the capacity of existing power lines.
The plans come ahead of an expected surge in electricity demand, driven by a wave of power-hungry electric vehicles and new data centers for artificial-intelligence technology. That is a departure from the past two decades, when stagnant demand gave power companies little incentive to modernize their systems.
Now utilities are scrambling for relatively fast ways to boost capacity.
“Things have changed quickly,” said Jørgen Festervoll, chief executive of Heimdall Power, a Norwegian company that makes sensors that help optimize electricity distribution.In Minnesota, a pilot project by Great River Energy showed that Heimdall’s sensors could increase transmission capacity by about 40%. Known in the industry as “magic balls,” the sensors measure in real time how weather conditions and other factors affect power lines. When the wind blows, for example, power lines are cooler, allowing for more capacity.
The sensors let Great River adjust how much power it transmits over wires, a system known as dynamic line rating. In March, the utility said it planned to install 52 more sensors, making it the largest dynamic line rating project in the U.S.
“It’s not a silver bullet fix, but it does increase capacity,” said Priti Patel, Great River’s vice president of transmission.
Another relatively cheap and quick way to boost capacity: replace existing power lines with high-performance wires. Wide-scale adoption could help quadruple U.S. transmission capacity by 2035, according to a report by the University of California, Berkeley and GridLab, an energy consulting firm....
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