Getting more out of the grid we've already built

Clean-energy transmission lines in the US are horribly congested, and buildout of new ones is agonizingly slow. Yet while other parts of the world use grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) to significantly improve performance of existing transmission lines, the US system has been resistant to deploying them. In this episode, Julia Selker, head of a GETs trade group called the WATT Coalition, discusses the potential of GETs.

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David Roberts

One of the primary threats to the clean energy buildout spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act is a lack of transmission. Models show that hitting our Paris climate targets would involve building two to three times our current transmission capacity, yet new lines are desperately slow to come online. Meanwhile, existing lines are congested and hundreds of gigawatts of new clean energy sits waiting in interconnection queues.

Wouldn’t it be cool if there were some relatively cheap and speedy ways to get more capacity out of the transmission infrastructure we’ve already built? To ease some of that congestion and get more clean energy online while we wait for new lines to be completed?

As it happens, there are. They are called grid-enhancing technologies, or GETs, and they can improve the performance of existing transmission lines by as much as 40 percent.

It’s just that, in the US at least, utilities aren’t deploying them. They’ve been tested and deployed all over the world, but the US system has resisted using them at scale.

I contacted Julia Selker, head of the Working for Advanced Transmission Technologies (WATT) Coalition, a GETs trade group, to discuss exactly what these technologies are, their enormous potential to ease grid congestion, why utilities still resist them, and what kinds of policies can help move them along.

So with no further ado, Julia Selker. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Julia Selker

Thank you so much for having me.

David Roberts

This is, to me, a very exciting topic that is like many exciting topics in the world of energy, somewhat obscured behind a wall of jargon and technical sounding terms. So we're going to do our best up front to decode some of this and lay it out in a simple way so people can grasp it. But before we get to GETs, before we get to the GETs, let's talk just a little bit about the need here, the need for more capacity on the transmission system. Run down a little bit, because I know you've done or have been involved in some research on grid congestion and things like that, give us a little rundown of why this topic is so important right now.

Julia Selker

Yeah, absolutely. The United States is basically desperate for transmission capacity and there are a few ways that we see that in data, and one is transmission congestion. So this is a quantification of the cost of a transmission constraint. So if you don't have enough transmission to deliver the cheapest electricity, you'll then have to turn on a thermal generator or something more expensive than a wind or solar generator, for instance, and that will increase costs for consumers. So back in the day, let's say 2016, the market monitors found $3.7 billion of congestion in the regional transmission organizations and the independent system operators that actually transparently report congestion data.

And if you scale that to the whole US, we're looking at about $6.5 billion in congestion in 2016. But in 2022, the national number was over $20 billion in congestion.

David Roberts

20 billion.

Julia Selker

20 billion. It's rising astronomically. And it makes sense: There's more low cost generation available, gas prices are going up. So the redispatch cost is another term for this is going to get higher as you have to curtail more renewables and dispatch more expensive generation because there's just not enough transmission to deliver all the clean energy. So we also see this in clean energy interconnection costs and delays. Back when there was a lot of headroom on the grid from large scale infrastructure expansion back in the day that projects could interconnect at lower costs and with faster timelines.

But now projects are seeing bigger and bigger upgrades, all that headroom is used up and projects are seeing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in transmission upgrades that need to happen in order for them to interconnect to the grid.

David Roberts

Volts listeners will recall just a few weeks ago had a pod on interconnection queues and they'll recall that sort of you get in a single file line and if you happen to be the project that triggers a need for a transmission upgrade, that whole cost gets added to your project, which renders many projects unviable. And that's just happening more and more often now because the grid is more and more congested and there's more and more upgrades needed. So it's making that process take longer too.

Julia Selker

Yeah, and beyond the cost. I've heard from clean energy developers that they are looking at seven years to actually make the transmission upgrade, or in one case, four years to szslchedule an outage to begin construction. So that's not sustainable at all. And there are policy actions that are taking place to try to make these processes more efficient. But the fundamental issue is there's not enough transmission capacity and we need to be finding it fast.

David Roberts

There's no way to fiddle with processes enough to get around that, which is there's just not enough transmission capacity.

Julia Selker

Exactly.

David Roberts

Given all that, we need more transmission capacity. New transmission capacity takes forever to build in the US. Which is a problem a lot of people are working on. But even reforms look like they're years out and then more years out to build the new lines. So here we have then this set of technologies that can help us get more transmission capacity out of the existing grid. The GETs, the grid enhancing technologies. So let's talk about first what counts as a GET and let's run through the big ones.

Julia Selker

Sure. So there are some practical reasons that certain technologies would fall under the GETs category, and there are some policy reasons too, so I'll cover both of those. But the items that we think about are does this technology make use of the dynamic capabilities of the grid to increase transmission capacity? That's sort of the practical category. So, we're used to thinking about transmission lines, transformers, substations. We install them, and they have these set capabilities that are based on really conservative assumptions. And when you have digital technologies and high tech communications, you can actually monitor these assets and make more efficient use of them depending on grid conditions.

And another value we look for from a technical perspective is the redeployability. So if you build a new transmission line, great, you have a new line right where you put it. But with these technologies, you can use them as stopgap measures. If you have a big line under construction and you want to reduce costs in the interim, or you're expecting grid topology or the grid assets to change or increase, but you're not sure how. It