Dive Summary:
- Hundreds of engineers drawing up designs to bolster Eastern Interconnection are close to completing the project, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Eastern Interconnection Planning Collaborative.
- “The redesign would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by replacing coal with wind energy and give the United States something it has never had, a grid designed for shipping bulk amounts of electricity across the continent,” the NYTimes reports.
- But what’s standing in the way of adopting this big-scale grid change is not money, technology or engineering skill, experts say. Rather, power grid owners are divided on how to move the grid forward. Each has a stake in what will help their business, but not necessarily the Eastern Interconnection as a whole. For example, enhancing infrastructure to transmit power from the best renewable sites to areas with high demand would be ideal, but it lacks widespread support amongst those with vested interests in the grid
From the article:.
“There’s no overall transmission planning for the entire interconnection,” said Vladimir S. Koritarov, deputy director of the Center for Energy, Environmental and Economic Systems Analysis at Argonne National Laboratory. There is some hope for individual projects, although experts say they are the equivalent of building Interstate highways one route at a time.