Up to 40 percent of the region’s grid could be suitable for reconductoring—for less than half the time and cost of building new transmission lines.
||| FROM SIGHTLINE INSTITUTE |||
The lights could soon dim on the Northwest’s climate goals unless the electric grid gets some serious TLC.
The region, like the United States as a whole, needs more electric transmission capacity to reach the best wind and solar resources and meet rising power demand without burning coal or gas. But building new transmission lines can take decades and cost billions. Luckily there are no-brainer ways to squeeze more juice out of the existing electric grid.
Among the options, reconductoring—swapping out the wires on transmission lines for higher capacity ones—holds particular promise for its relative speed to deployment, capacity potential, and cost.1
Reconductoring can more than double a line’s capacity, costs less than half the price of building a brand-new line, and can take just 18 to 36 months to implement.
In the Northwest, up to 23,000 miles of transmission lines (about 40 percent of the region’s electric grid) could be suitable for reconductoring.2 To get more wire upgrade projects off the ground, policymakers can improve utility planning processes, fast-track permitting, and introduce performance incentives. With most of the region’s grid strung up with wires invented more than 100 years ago, a grid glow-up is long overdue.
Reconductoring can double transmission lines’ capacity for less than half the cost of building new lines
Why should people who care about climate change pay attention to wires? Here’s a quick primer: In sum, the type of wire—conductor—on a transmission line affects how much power it can carry, how much electricity it wastes, and how much it sags. (Sagging lines can spark wildfires.) Swapping out old wires with the latest and greatest technology is far cheaper, faster, and easier than building whole new transmission lines.
For more than 100 years, transmission owners have strung up the same type of wire. Aluminum conductor steel reinforced (ACSR), as it is known, remains the default conductor for most transmission projects in the United States.
In the Northwest, nearly all investor-owned utilities’ transmission lines are outfitted with ACSR, as Figure 1 shows. (Bonneville Power Administration [BPA], which owns and operates most of the region’s high-voltage transmission system, does not provide detailed data about conductor type. However, the vast majority of its lines use ACSR, according to a BPA representative.)
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Reconductoring is claimed to cost roughly half of new-build transmission lines. New construction estimates vary wildly but seem to run around $1 million/mile. If you take the 23,000 miles of NW grid that are suitable for reconductoring and use $500k/mile the total would be $11.5 billion. Unfortunately about half of those short line miles are on wood poles and those would need to be replaced, not just new conductors, so another 25% on top of that eye-watering number, bringing us to a wild guess of 15 BILLION dollars for reconductoring a portion of the NW grid. Where is that money going to come from? Even if my calculations are seriously off-base, it seems likely that the cost of reconductoring is going to be too high to politically contemplate.
It seems like too much money to just kick the can down the road a little further. Reducing peak demand sounds like the more cost-effective option. Excess capacity in all our infrastructure is a luxury we can no longer afford, economically OR ecologically. Unfortunately it seems that the only way to get citizens to conserve (anything) is to make it personally expensive to the end user.
A small example: How much water do you use brushing your teeth at home compared to when you are backpacking and carrying your water? So, how do we inspire THAT level of efficient use with electricity? I think the answer is clear: make it TOO EXPENSIVE TO WASTE.