Creaky U.S. power grid threatens progress on renewables, EVs

[mahatmakanejeeves]

A REUTERS SPECIAL REPORT

Creaky U.S. power grid threatens progress on renewables, EVs

The nation’s transmission network, plagued by outages and increasingly severe weather, needs a trillion-dollar overhaul to handle the Biden administration’s promised clean-energy revolution. No one is taking charge of that problem.

By TIM MCLAUGHLIN Filed May 12, 2022, 10 a.m. GMT

After decades of struggle, the U.S. clean-energy business is booming, with soaring electric-car sales and fast growth in wind and solar power. That’s raising hopes for the fight against climate change. ... All this progress, however, could be derailed without a massive overhaul of America’s antiquated electric infrastructure – a task some industry experts say requires more than $2 trillion. The current network of transmission wires, substations and transformers is decaying with age and underinvestment, a condition highlighted by catastrophic failures during increasingly frequent and severe weather events.

Power outages over the last six years have more than doubled in number compared to the previous six years, according to a Reuters examination of federal data. In the past two years, power systems have collapsed in Gulf Coast hurricanes, West Coast wildfires, Midwest heat waves and a Texas deep freeze, causing long and sometimes deadly outages.

Compounding the problem, the seven regional grid operators in the United States are underestimating the growing threat of severe weather caused by climate change, Reuters found in a review of more than 10,000 pages of regulatory documents and operators’ public disclosures. Their risk models, used to guide transmission-network investments, consider historical weather patterns extending as far back as the 1970s. None account for scientific research documenting today’s more extreme weather and how it can disrupt grid generation, transmission and fuel supplies simultaneously.

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[NNadir]

1. Meredith Angwin wrote a excellent book on the topic.

It's called "Shorting the Grid, the Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid." It has a good deal to say about how we value reliability in this country, which is not at all, since we've made our power systems dependent on natural gas along with weather dependent systems that are inherently unreliable.

We added the weather dependence at precisely at the time we destabilized the weather by pretending that so called "renewable energy" was about climate change as opposed to antinuke fear and ignorance.