The millions of people who struggled to keep warm in Texas, with blackouts crippling life inside a dominant energy hub, have laid bare the desperate state of U.S. electricity grids. To fix nationwide vulnerabilities, President Joe Biden will have to completely reimagine the American way of producing and transmitting electricity.
Biden wants to overhaul the nation’s grids so they derive all electricity from carbon-free sources by 2035—a major step toward zeroing out net emissions of greenhouse gases by mid-century. Realizing that goal will require building billions of dollars worth of new transmission lines, a challenge that might prove just as difficult as getting his climate agenda through Congress.
The existing network just isn’t sufficient to achieve the scale of wind and solar power that Biden needs, says Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University. Getting to a fully green grid “would require a new nation-building mode like we haven’t seen since probably the post-war period, when we built the highways and did rural electrification.” He estimates that the U.S. needs to expand its transmission grid by as much as 60% for wind and solar to make up half of U.S. electricity capacity by 2030.
Switching to renewables and electrifying vehicles will require rethinking many of the assumptions that underpin the existing grid system. For much of its industrial life, the U.S. relied on power plants in or near the communities they served. If more power was needed, monopolistic utilities were ready to add it by burning more coal or natural gas. A clean grid will probably be more decentralized, powered in part by smaller renewables facilities including rooftop solar as well as batteries. It will also have to be smarter and more flexible.
While Texas built new transmission lines that support renewable energy, its continued reliance on fossil fuels failed the state this month. The cold snap triggered shutdowns at some plants fired by coal and gas that weren’t designed to withstand such extreme temperatures. Some wind turbines also stopped spinning. The state’s grid is largely isolated from the rest of the U.S., in part for political reasons, and operators unable to call on neighbors for help were forced to implement blackouts.
Biden’s push for more resilient grids equipped to handle clean energy could help in extreme weather, though choosing to rely heavily on the intermittent power produced by solar and wind farms would bring its own complications.
Some of the most robust solar and wind resources are trapped in corners of the desert or the Plains, or located offshore, far from the cities. To connect those projects to the grids, the country will need new transmission lines—complicated projects that have proven to be bureaucratic nightmares and far more tedious to develop than clean-power plants.
There’s already a large backlog of proposed wind and solar projects waiting to be hooked up to grids. More than 230 gigawatts of wind capacity was seeking transmission interconnection at the end of 2018, according to the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy.
Solar panels and wind turbines only generate electricity when the sun shines and the wind blows. Excess power can be stored in batteries. While batteries are becoming cheaper as demand grows, they’re still expensive and haven’t been tested on a large scale on the grid.
“The grid wasn’t built for 100% renewable energy,” says Michael Skelly, a senior adviser at Lazard Ltd. who spent much of the last decade running a company focused on developing long-distance power lines. The work is painstaking, and builders have come to expect federal, regional or local snags, especially for projects that cross state lines. “It’s not a secret that this is difficult,” Skelly says, though he thinks the task may be easier today. “The world is even more partisan, but on the other hand there’s a greater understanding of the need to do it.”