Solar and wind power use a lot of land, and are best sited in areas that get a lot of sun or wind. With the exception of hydropower, these can generally be located near the cities where their electricity is used, leaving relatively little need to transmit power over long distances. Historically, most electricity came from coal, natural gas, nuclear, or hydropower. All the energy that is currently being moved around the country in coal trains, natural gas pipelines, and gasoline trucks will instead be flowing through the electrical grid.Īt the same time, the mix of electricity sources is changing. Ground transportation is shifting from gasoline to electric vehicles, heating is shifting from furnaces to heat pumps, and so forth. However, demand for electricity is about to skyrocket, as we “electrify everything” in order to get away from fossil fuels.

Big Demands Are Coming For The Transmission Grid The more transmission capacity we can add, the faster and cheaper the energy transition will be. (In this post, I focus on the US, but many of the issues apply across the globe.) The good news is that there are plenty of solutions available, if we can get organized to take advantage of them. Unfortunately, our system for planning new transmission projects in the US is terrible. This will greatly increase transmission requirements. In the coming years, we’re going to be using a lot more electricity, and it’s going to be coming from a wider variety of sources. When the electricity grid falls short, we call it a blackout. When the traffic system falls short, we call that “rush hour”. It’s similar to the problem of moving cars around a city. Moving electricity around is inherently challenging, because we need enough capacity at every location in the country, at every moment of the day. This turns out to be a difficult problem: so difficult, in fact, that it may be the single largest hurdle remaining on our path to phasing out fossil fuels. Solar panels, wind turbines, pumped hydro, battery storage, advanced geothermal, biomass, advanced nuclear: none of these electricity sources do much good unless they can be connected to electricity users.

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