The grid is insufficient for renewable energy sources. BPA has a $2 billion plan.

Transmission adequacy is an issue across the West, where states, utilities and local governments have adopted clean energy policies in response to the impacts of climate change. (Clinton Carpenter/Bonneville Power Administration/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This story was originally published by Columbia Insight.

Building a new high-voltage transmission system is expensive, complex and complicated, but without it, compliance with government clean energy requirements will be difficult to achieve – maybe impossible.

In July, the Bonneville Power Administration announced a plan to devote more than $2 billion to numerous high-voltage substation and transmission line projects needed to strengthen the transmission grid connecting the American Northwest to the American Southwest and pointing east.

“These projects aim to increase efficiency and address regional growth, as well as provide an abundance of new, clean energy resources,” the agency said in a statement. “The projects must pass an environmental assessment and, if completed, will support thousands of megawatts of renewable energy added to the power grid and help customers in Oregon and Washington meet their 2030 clean energy goals.”

The six projects would strengthen Bonneville’s existing east-west main transmission lines, increasing the ability of those lines to carry electricity from the eastern part of the region – Montana, eastern Idaho – west to loading centers such as the Puget Sound area and Portland.

These projects, combined with several smaller projects near Seattle and Portland, would strengthen transmission lines that deliver electricity to utilities and large industrial companies that are Bonneville customers in those areas.

Preliminary estimates indicate that the total projects will cost approximately USD 1.35 billion and will be launched in 2025–2032.

If all connected to electricity, they would provide at least 6,000 megawatts of additional power to the Bonneville transmission grid.

Additionally, Bonneville is working on four projects in Central Oregon, where utilities are seeing significant growth in demand and attracting large commercial customers.

These projects include one new transmission line and three substations.

It is estimated that in total they will cost $839 million and will enable the support of new services for large incoming customers and the increase in load in the region, while maintaining high transmission reliability.

“A matter of big money”

Transmission adequacy is an issue across the West, where states, utilities and local governments have adopted clean energy policies in response to the impacts of climate change.

The aim is to improve the efficiency of high-voltage transmission, thereby helping to gradually shift electricity supply away from generators burning fossil fuels towards new and existing renewable energy, in particular wind and solar energy.

Although transmission is an unlikely topic of casual conversation among friends, it attracts the attention of utilities, public service organizations, environmental groups and government agencies that either transmit power or have an interest in it.

This is not a trivial matter. This is a big-money issue, fraught with complexities such as siting issues (where to build new lines) and litigation, particularly disputes over environmental impacts such as habitat protection for endangered species such as the sage-grouse.

For example, the start of construction on a new line through eastern Oregon to eastern Idaho has been delayed for years due to actual and potential litigation over issues such as the line’s location, property owners’ reluctance to sell road rights, and impacts on sage-grouse. habitat and the historic Oregon Trail.

Another problem is the current system of contracting access to transmission. This archaic system sometimes leaves lines fully contracted but not fully utilized.

In addition to the projects announced in July and others announced earlier this year, BPA is also launching a demand study in the high-priority Mountain Northwest transmission corridor to accelerate the expansion of transmission systems.

The Mountain Northwest High Priority Transmission Corridor, designated by the federal Department of Energy in May, is a 500-foot-wide, 500-mile-long corridor from The Dalles to Nevada. It is one of 10 high priority transmission planning areas in the country.

The DOE designation identifies 10 areas as places where new transmission capacity is needed to help move anticipated new electricity, such as wind and solar power in the West, from generation to off-taker.

The designation is intended to expedite federal planning and construction of new lines in areas where line congestion is currently or will be a problem.

A unanimous call for better planning

During an August transmission planning webinar, Ravi Aggarwal, BPA’s director of regional transmission planning, said the agency’s intentions for the Mountain Northwest corridor have not been finalized.

But he said additional lines in the corridor where power lines already exist could provide an alternative to congested lines, including the Pacific Northwest/Pacific Southwest Intertie lines that connect the northwestern part of the corridor to utilities in southern California.

At the seminar, Rich Glick, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said that FERC’s 2015 nationwide order, Executive Order No. 1000, which reformed FERC’s electric transmission planning and cost allocation requirements for utility transmission providers, “was “It is a major success in the sense that… it really responds to the almost unanimous call for better and proactive transmission planning.”

In addition to streamlining the broadcast scheduling process – FERC must approve new lines – Order 1000 also called on transmission planners to consider alternatives to new lines.

These so-called “network improvement technologies,” which Bonneville relied on to improve transmissions along the Interstate 5 corridor in 2015, could include, for example, upgrading substations and grid control technologies to allow existing lines to transmit more power.

While Glick acknowledged that “some of these new projects will be expensive,” grid improvement technologies, also known as wireless alternatives, offer the possibility of what he called “ways to stretch the dollar to more efficiently use existing assets” (i) to avoid creating new projects.”

The seminar was hosted by Seattle-based energy and fish and wildlife newsletter Clearing Up.

In opening remarks at the seminar, Clearing Up editor Steve Ernst said: “Transmission development in the West is currently the greatest obstacle to achieving state renewable energy goals and maintaining reliability in the West. It became clear that a historic development in broadcasting had taken place – both long-distance transmission lines connecting the Intermountain West to load centers along the coast and shorter projects around dense urban areas will be needed to meet both short- and long-term clean energy requirements.”

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