There is a growing recognition in the industry that the current pace of transmission development is insufficient to meet the decarbonization goals of industry stakeholders.[1] Rapidly attainable increases in transmission capacity are necessary to pre-empt significant curtailments and to avert the resulting impact to the renewable energy industry.
The EIA predicts the contribution of renewable energy to the US electric power sector to grow significantly over the next three decades, with estimates ranging from 31% to 43%.[2],[3] Nearly all this growth is attributed to wind and solar photovoltaics projected to increase from ~9% at the present to 35% by 2050. This means, by 2050, over one-third of the total system energy will have to be delivered using the transmission system that was designed and built for a different mix of generation resources.
Because of the complexities related to permitting rights-of-way for new transmission lines, the industry is on a trajectory where the development of new renewable generation projects significantly outpaces the development of transmission needed to integrate them. This presents a major economic risk to the renewable industry—once the transmission constraints become binding, the output from renewable projects must be curtailed. Once the curtailments become significant, the renewable projects become stranded assets, which is likely to result in a precipitous drop in available capital for new projects and is likely to stunt the growth of the renewable industry.
Clearly, increasing transfer capacity of transmission will be necessary, but to make an impact in the near term, we must consider non-wire alternatives. The emergence of utility scale power electronics, notably the availability of modular multi-level converter (MMC) technology, presents an opportunity for a resurgence of flexible AC transmission (FACTS). Converter-based FACTS devices offer an unprecedented degree of control of transmission flows, can be built on existing rights-of-way, and have insignificant environmental impact. At the price level of $150/kVA, a 100MVA FACTS device can be built for $15M, which is comparable to the investment needed to build just five miles of new transmission.
We are developing a technology, based on scalable compute, to quantify the entitlement to increase transfer capacity of the US transmission system by the pervasive deployment of flow control technology. For more information, or to partner with us, please contact us.