At my current company we're working on one of the problems involved in this in much of the developed world. Actually coming to the point where you can lay power lines is a huge issue that has to do with figuring out property ownership, the stuff that's already in the ground, water ways, roads, trees and more. People work months on finding a route that's actually possible and that sometimes involves paying a lot to property owners for using their land.

Right now we're creating a tool that gives the engineers insight into all these factors and automatically creates possible routes through all this madness. It's quite interesting to work on and fascinating to learn about all these complexities. It also doesn't scale well, we're building this for the Netherlands, which has a lot of centralized, (mostly) open data that can be used. In other countries that's not so much true.

I used to be a permitting attorney. My wife is presently a prominent permitting attorney who works on linear transmission corridor projects at a large firm. Unless we change the permitting process, and several federal environmental laws in particular, we will never realize even a fraction of the capacity required to hit our renewables goals. We can’t get a single new line across the cascades in Oregon, much less the dozens that will be required. Tidal energy faces the same issues vis-à-vis the load centers on the other side of the coast range.

We are facing a major crisis in South Africa where we used to have more than enough power, 30 years ago, but the government neglected the maintenance of the network, and now we cannot make enough electricity, nor even maintain the existing levels!

> "At the turn of the century a couple of power plants a year might be connected ... new plants often using the same connections as old ones."

It's still generally true that the old grid infrastructure is re-used.

The UK has many closed coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power plants on or near the coast. When those plants are decommissioned or demolished, the grid infrastructure that was built for them (substations, transmission lines) is usually left intact.

New off-shore wind farms can now use those access points, which greatly reduces the cost of connection compared to having to build everything from scratch.

HN may be interested in the rest of the special report, which is here https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2023-04-08

Here in Canada my province went through a hurricane last Sept. I was without power for 10 days.

Much of the problems were due to poor maintenance; trees not trimmed, old poles not replaced, transformers old, salt spray on wires, etc. But the parent company crowed each year of profits and dividends. They also raised rates 5% to 10% each year claiming they had no money.

Solar would help but we also need a stable grid. But even with solar my local government doesn't even allow the use of battery storage in homes batteries can only go in garages.

Just as with nuclear power reactors, I hope that we can develop standard transformer modules that would reduce the need for "one off" production, and utilize the economies of scale that modern manufacturing is capable of delivering.

Smaller standard designs would make it easier to handle disruptions, make a power grid more resilient in the face of natural or man-made disaster. It would also make it easier to scale. Having a power grid with interchangeable parts would reduce the logistical complexity of spares management.

In the US grid capacity doubled from 1960-1970 and doubled again from 1970-1980. We can do it again :)

Let's not forget that solar panels or roofs and local batteries (EV cars) *reduces* load on the grid. Hyperlocal power generation does that.

tl;dr Connecting new power generation to the electricity grid is a queue-based permit system that is stupid and slow, but simple and supremely stable. There is a decent chunk of renewable power “in the queue” but speeding up the connection process risks damaging stability.

The article notes India’s electrification as a partial counter-example: relatively fast, but correspondingly relatively unstable. (One marker mentioned was “kerosene liters consumed”, as a proxy for how much lighting has been replaced by electricity, they note the amount dropped from 9 billion liters to 2 billion liters, which I take as a very rough indicator of ~80% grid reliability - not even one “9“ of stability. It’s hard to find representative data on developed-world power grid reliability but for instance there is a common estimate that the average Australian resident experiences 200 minutes of power outage per year, which corresponds to somewhere above three-and-a-half 9s and below four 9s. This suggests potentially quite an extreme cost in stability for the moderate benefit of speeding up queue times for renewable power.)

here in CA, the CPUC is trying their best to prevent people from adding Solar to their roofs. They've even got rid of Net metering almost entirely with their new NEM 3 rules.

Nice survey of challenges. For follow ups, deep dives on the manufacturing of grid hardware and software would be cool.

For a (mostly) US perspective, check out David Roberts' Volts, "a newsletter about clean energy and politics". https://www.volts.wft Links below to episodes specifically about grids.

But since our grid is the elephant in the room, it's touched on in most episodes.

My noob TLDR for USA is:

Overlapping jurisdictions are a huge roadblock. To build new capacity, you likely need permits and buy off from every state, county, property owner, and special interest touched.

There's no federal plan to reform our currently siloed systems. Build Back Better addressed this. But because the Inflation Reduction Act was passed thru "reconciliation", it doesn't contain those "third leg" of necessary reforms. Huge disappointment.

Predictably, progress is being further stymied by a huge reactionary anti-electrification noise machine. All the usual suspects are dumping money into astroturf groups and propaganda to oppose anything and everything, from windmills to induction stoves.

NIMBYs have weaponized environmental regulations, created in response to past abuses, to thwart progress.

Just like how "the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it", reformers and innovators are finding alternatives. Stuff like: colocating generation with consumers (industrial heat), embracing geothermal, and beefing up existing grids with storage.

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Transmission week: why we need more big power lines https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-week-why-we-need-more#d...

Transmission week: how to start building more big power lines https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-week-how-to-start-build...

Transmission fortnight: burying power lines next to rail & roads to make a national transmission grid https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-fortnight-burying-power...

Transmission month: how to make the existing grid work better https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-month-how-to-make-the#d...

Transmission month: two more ideas to quickly boost the transmission grid https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-month-two-more-ideas#de...

The challenges of building transmission in the US, and how to overcome them, with Liza Reed https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-the-challenges-of-buil...

What's up with Manchin's plan to reform energy permitting? https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-up-with-manchins-plan-to-refor...

[Bay Area] Peninsula Clean Energy attempts to achieve 24/7 clean energy https://www.volts.wtf/p/an-energy-provider-attempts-to-achie...

Utilities are lobbying against the public interest. Here's how to stop it. https://www.volts.wtf/p/utilities-are-lobbying-against-the#d...

People are so wedded to fossil fuel religion, they'd rather pretend their country is entirely incapable of the most basic tasks.

China isn't playing by the pretend limitations you put on yourself and it looks like you've already admitted they deserve to be the new hegemon. Yay for totalitarian communism I guess.

The stat that 80% of the UK queue might be effectively domain squatters with no actual project waiting to flip to real developers is shocking. Pure rent seeking middlemen.

Though at the same time, it means all the other stats are BS. Like saying that a concert is sold out and there's no way to get a ticket until the next time they visit in 5 years time because 80% have been sold to scalper's bots. It just doesn't logically add up. The tickets are available, you just need to pay a markup to a scalper who performs no real service to society.

It's an outright trivial task.

This can tip the scale in favor of efuels (as opposed to battery-electric). Just run the electrolysis straight from a windfarm and produce at the rate the windfarm is currently outputting.