“Perhaps the single greatest risk to a successful energy transition during the 2020s is the risk that the nation fails to site, modernize, and build out the electrical grid.” That is a conclusion of a major National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report released last Friday (Oct. 19). The report added, “Except where new transmission has been shown as needed to keep the lights on, adding transmission is complicated by the need to secure cooperation from numerous individual landowners and affected publics—many of whom may perceive greater cost than benefit from high voltage transmission lines.”
The report is the second of two reports in a series – “Accelerating Decarbonization of the U.S. Energy System” — examining the U.S. goals of a “net-zero” society by 2050. The first report, according to the NAS, looked at “technical and federal policy blueprint for the next 10 years, and its recommendations helped shape climate policies included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”
The latest report, said the NAS, “focuses on gaps and barriers to implementation of net-zero policies, emphasizing the need for a strong social contract during the decades-long transition.” The gaps and barriers the NAS committee identified include “energy justice and equity, public health, the workforce, public engagement, clean electricity, the built environment, land use, transportation, industrial decarbonization, the financial sector, the future of fossil fuels, and state and local government roles.” It includes over 80 recommendations targeting private and public sector actions.
The starkest barrier the report identifies is high-voltage electric transmission. As Rob Gramlich, president of consulting firm Grid Strategies LLC, put it, “No transmission, no transition.”
The NAS report warns, “The need for adding new transmission capacity and pathways during the 2020s is unprecedented, given the committee’s goal of at least 75 percent clean power by 2030 laid out in the first report. Studies show that without significant new transmission capacity, renewables deployment would be delayed, just as electrification of transport and heating are starting to increase demands for power.”
What could that failure mean? “The net result could be increased generation by fossil electricity plants and increased national fossil emissions during the 2020s, which would make the entire effort appear to be a failure, even assuming that investments in energy efficiencies occur in conjunction with electrification. This would also prolong and increase the environmental injustice of exposure to dangerous particulate emissions from fossil power plants.”
How important is building transmission, compared to other actions? “Expansion of the high-voltage interstate transmission grid is needed in addition to, rather than instead of, modernization of local electricity distribution systems, deployment of energy resources (such as solar and storage) close to customers, and much-more-aggressive adoption of energy efficiency.”
Princeton ecology and evolutionary biology professor Stephen Pacala, chair of the committee that wrote the report, said, “Recent energy and climate policies are revolutionary and unprecedented in both scale and scope, putting the U.S. on or close to a path to zero net emissions by mid-century. They are also designed to realize a fair and equitable energy transition, improve human health, and revitalize U.S. manufacturing. With so much at stake, the main challenge now is effective implementation of these policies. This report addresses how the nation can best overcome the barriers that will slow or prevent a just energy transition, and also fills some gaps in the existing policy portfolio.”
In addition to electric transmission, the report examines:
- Broadening the Climate Policy Portfolio
- Ensuring Equity, Justice, and Health
- Supporting Rigorous and Transparent Analysis and Reporting
- Ensuring Procedural Equity in Infrastructure Planning
- Reforming Financial Markets
- Building the Needed Workforce and Capacity
- Updating Targets for the Industrial and Building Sectors
- Managing the Future of the Fossil Fuel Sector
–Kennedy Maize
kenmaize@gmail.com
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