On August 14, 2018, Joshua Novacheck, a 30-year-old research engineer for the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was presenting the most important study of his nascent career.... Novacheck was sharing the results of the Interconnections Seam Study, better known as Seams. The Seams study demonstrated that stronger connections between the U.S. power system’s massive eastern and western power grids would accelerate the growth of wind and solar energy—hugely reducing American reliance on coal, the fuel contributing the most to climate change, and saving consumers billions....
Democrats in Congress have recently cited NREL’s work to argue for billions in grid upgrades and sweeping policy changes. But a study like Seams was politically dangerous territory for a federally funded lab while coal-industry advocates—and climate-change deniers—reign in the White House. The Trump administration has a long history of protecting coal companies.... Trump officials would ultimately block Seams from seeing the light of day....
A nearly impermeable electrical “seam” divides America’s eastern and western power grids. These giant pools of alternating current on either side of the Rockies contain a total of 950 gigawatts of power generation by thousands of power plants. (A third grid serves Texas.) But only a little over one gigawatt can cross between them. Western-grid power plants in Colorado send bulk power more than 1,000 miles away to California, for example, but merely a trickle across the seam to its next-door neighbor Nebraska. That separation raises power costs, and makes it hard to share growing surpluses of environmentally friendly wind and solar power. And years of neglect have left the grids—and the few connections between them—overloaded and ill-prepared to transition to highly variable renewable energy. The Seams study set out to determine whether uniting America’s big grids would pay....
The fallout was swift: The lab grounded Bloom and Novacheck, prohibiting them from presenting the Seams results or even discussing the study outside NREL.... The $1.6 million study itself disappeared. NREL yanked the completed findings from its website and deleted power-flow visualizations from its YouTube channel.
 |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid |
Bloom showed off his team’s sophisticated methodology using high-resolution video simulations. One simulation showed a hypothetical heat wave in August 2038, causing air conditioners to drive up power demand. As the rising sun swept across the U.S., yellow circles representing solar plants expanded. Surplus power from solar plants in the West flooded eastward, limiting the need for pricier and dirtier midwestern coal power. And as the sun set, the Midwest’s expansive wind farms began to spin, sending power westward and minimizing use of the West’s coal- and gas-fired generators....
As expected, the simulations showed that exchanging power across the Rockies enables generators on either side to serve a wider area, reducing the number of plants required, and trims operation of the remaining fossil-fueled generators. And they demonstrated that the resulting savings in fuel and equipment more than pay for the added transmission. The benefits were particularly dramatic for the carbon-price scenario. It would eliminate up to 35 megatons of CO2 emissions a year by 2038—equivalent to the current annual carbon emissions from U.S. natural-gas production and distribution. And it would return about $2.50 or more for every $1 invested in transmission....
The design that delivered the largest cost reduction linked up transmission lines to form a new transcontinental network: a “supergrid.” Seams simulated a 7,500-mile supergrid that would ship bulk power around the U.S.—a network reaching from Washington State to Florida. Even in the study’s less-ambitious scenario, the supergrid was saving consumers $3.6 billion a year by 2038.
But there was a problem: Improving the energy grid would reduce America’s reliance on coal
Enhanced grid resilience was a likely outcome of the Seams expansions....
According to Susan Tierney, a former assistant secretary of energy who chairs NREL’s External Advisory Council, national labs have operated with considerable independence in the past: “There was an understanding that the labs have a duty to perform quality research. I was not familiar with situations where there was an editorial thumb on the scale.”
But under Trump, political appointees have made unprecedented moves to regulate how science is conducted, according to a historical analysis and warning by experts in science and the law in the journal Science. And other scientific studies—especially those related to climate change—have been similarly slow-walked or buried. One of them was a DOE-commissioned study on grid resiliency, completed in April 2018. Michael Webber, an energy expert at the University of Texas at Austin and the study’s leader, notes that his conclusion—that increased transmission, not just fuel-storing generators, helps grids respond to extreme events—conflicted with statements made by DOE leaders. “I never got a message from anybody saying ‘Please do a study that concludes coal is magical,’ so there was never direct pressure on me for that. But I could sort of read the winds,” Webber says.
In the case of Seams, DOE’s interference has had a real and practical impact. Caspary says he has been waiting for access to Seams’ simulation tools to do follow-up studies for the Southwest Power Pool. There’s a growing backlog of wind and solar projects seeking to use the Pool’s lines....
... The power-industry expert Peter Fox-Penner, who runs the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy, says the U.S. is falling behind other major economies when it comes to creating the big grid links that make a transition to renewable energy possible. As Fox-Penner writes in his 2020 book, Power After Carbon: Building a Clean, Resilient Grid, “Without better integrated planning, we can’t even guess at the amount of transmission we need and where and how it should be built. Europe, Australia, and other countries are starting to get a good handle on these questions while the United States lags well behind.” The International Energy Agency has estimated that China’s growing interregional transmission could save its consumers and industries $9 billion a year.
Meanwhile, the nationwide report on grid congestion that DOE is required by law to update every three years—a crucial component of grid planning—is two years behind schedule.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/how-trump-appointees-short-circuited-grid-modernization/615433/
by Peter Fairley, journalist who covers energy, technology, and climate change.
The Atlantic www.Atlantic.com
August 20, 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment