Straight talk about the world’s transition from fossil fuels to renewables with energy expert Chris Nelder
The energy transition calls for more electrification. As transportation, heating, industry, and now power demand from data centers all crowd the interconnection queues, the US needs more transmission than it has built in generations. Even energy transition skeptics can agree on the wires.
But agreement on the need for more transmission has never been enough to get lines up and running. In 2019, journalist Russell Gold joined us to tell the story of Michael Skelly, who tried harder than anyone. His company, Clean Line Energy, spent a decade developing five major transmission lines to move wind power from the Midwest to the cities that needed it. His flagship line, the 700-mile Plains & Eastern, was fully permitted and offered the Tennessee Valley Authority twenty years of wind power at $18.50 per megawatt-hour, a price even the cheapest coal can’t match. But economics aside, TVA walked away and not one of the five lines got built. Gold’s book Superpower explains why engineering or economics weren’t able to overcome the rules written state by state that build “regulatory moats” around the incumbents and keep the outsiders out.
Seven years since then, and those moats are where the race to tackle growing power demand is backing up. Recently ERCOT froze approvals of new data-center connections while the state audits an interconnection queue that has swelled to roughly 474 gigawatts of requested power capacity, more than five times the all-time peak power demand on the Texas grid. In Washington, FERC ordered the six regional grid operators it oversees to explain where the transmission for loads like that will come from. The specific fights are new but the overall mechanism is the one Russell Gold mapped with our host Chris Nelder back in Episode #98.
Since then, Grain Belt Express, the line Skelly had to sell on the way down, has grown into an $11 billion, 800-mile project with $1.7 billion in construction contracts signed. And Skelly has a new company working on the first large-scale connection between America’s two big grids, a step toward the concept of Superpower that would tie the country’s balkanized regional grids into one that could more readily support the energy transition’s future.