A yearlong study ordered by Congress calls for a large-scale build-out of electricity lines to connect regional grids across the United States as the nation faces more extreme weather.
The report by the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the nation’s grid monitor, recommends building high-capacity transmission lines linking regional grids to strengthen a “neighbor-helps-neighbor” strategy against powerful blizzards, heat waves, floods and other emergencies.
NERC called for increasing power transfer capacity in targeted regions by a total of 35,000 megawatts nationwide — roughly the amount of power produced by three dozen large nuclear reactors.
The NERC report lands as the nation’s energy policy outlook has suddenly reversed course with the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris by former President Donald Trump in Tuesday’s presidential election. Trump has promised to unleash U.S. oil and gas production in a bid to drive down energy prices while shutting down the Biden administration’s clean energy agenda.
But waiting for Trump’s administration are challenges emerging from sharply higher electricity demand fed by data center expansions. At the same time, utilities are closing centralized coal stations and bringing more wind and solar power onto the grid. To make sure utilities can recover more easily from violent storms, a bigger domestic supply chain for grid equipment will be needed if Trump slaps high tariffs on China.
Legislation to speed the siting and permitting of big new power lines is not expected to make it on the to-do list during a lame duck session of Congress later this year. One of the many questions ahead of the Trump transition is whether proposals to expand the U.S. grid on security and economic grounds will overcome possible hostility to grid expansion among Trump’s team and Republican congressional leadership. A much larger grid was a vital part of President Joe Biden’s campaign to convert the U.S. grid from primarily coal and gas generation to renewable power by the mid-2030s, and prominent Republicans oppose that strategy.
On proposal — the “Building Integrated Grids With Inter-Regional Energy Supply (BIG WIRES)” bill from Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) — would require neighboring regions to be able to share power equal to 30 percent of their peak demand. But that proposal did not win support in the NERC report. It said, “a one-size-fits-all requirement for a minimum amount of transfer capability may be inefficient and potentially ineffective.”
The NERC analysis compared possible shortages of available power in parts of the U.S. that have been hit hard in the past decade, including Texas during Winter Storm Uri in 2021, the mid-Atlantic states in Winter Storm Elliott the following year and a series of severe heat waves in many parts of the country in the past decade. Then it calculated how much emergency power would be “prudent” to import over new lines to get through similar future emergencies.
The NERC report is based in part on an analysis of what triggered blackouts in recent years, including winter storms Uri in February 2021 and Elliott over Christmas 2022. It looked at heat waves that blanketed the West.
“There are extraordinary challenges on the horizon,” said John Moura, NERC director of reliability assessment and performance analysis, citing a chaotic transition as coal and gas-powered plants retire faster than wind, solar, and energy storage can replace them.
“The only way to solve extraordinary challenges is with extraordinary action,” Moura added in an interview. “There’s an incredible amount of work to be done” to plan, site, approve and build major additions to the 400,000-mile interstate grid networks.
Moura and other NERC leaders have been repeating such warnings for years in increasingly gloomier tones. “There’s not really a venue or forum to do that kind of planning,” he said this week. “We don’t see a pathway.”
‘What the future holds for us’
Along with the NERC report, an even more massive study of potential grid expansions was recently completed by the Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office, led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
With an unprecedented computer analysis of future power flow scenarios down to the individual transmission substation level, the DOE National Transmission Planning Study estimated that a transitioning to 90 percent carbon-free power by 2035 would be most efficiently achieved through construction of an overlay of long-distance direct current lines. Advanced switching technology would provide maximum capability to route power in emergencies.
Every dollar invested in a stronger grid would repay $1.60 to $1.80, DOE estimates. Achieving those savings would require enlarging the interstate wires system by 3.5 times, a $1.4 trillion total investment between now and 2050.
Over the past year, Biden administration officials have stressed that building a bigger grid is needed to deal with increasing weather threats as the planet warms, and to introduce more price competition from new flows imported power.
According to NERC, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the grid operator in most of that state, has the greatest need, leading to NERC’s recommendation that Texas add 14,100 MW of new power-line capacity links to next-door systems. ERCOT is effectively an energy island, with minuscule transmission links to the outside to keep out federal regulation.
The Southeast region, which suffered rolling blackouts in over Christmas in 2022; the Midcontinent Independent System Operator’s (MISO) northern territory serving the central U.S.; northern California; the New York grid system; the Southwest Power Pool; PJM Interconnection in the mid-Atlantic region — each should add around 3,000 to 4,000 MW of additional transfer capacity, NERC concluded.
Florida, New England, and MISO’s southern region should add smaller amounts, NERC added.
In two cases, the NERC report advocated strengthening transmission ties across three adjoining regions, a “neighbor’s neighbor” assistance strategy, proposing new connections that would run from northern California to British Columbia and from ERCOT to the southeastern region.
Both the NERC and DOE grid studies invited close participation by state and regional grid decisionmakers. As the Biden-to-Trump transition happens, officials who worked on the study said the studies can survive as tools to help plan expansions.
“We hope this helps provide that technical foundation to what the future holds for us,” Moura said.
