Why America’s outdated energy grid is a climate problem
Transmission towers are shown on June 15, 2021 in Houston, Texas. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which controls approximately 90% of the power in Texas, has requested Texas residents to conserve power through Friday as temperatures surge in the state.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
This story is part of CNBC’s “Transmission Troubles” series, an inside look at why the aging electrical grid in the U.S. is struggling to keep up, how it’s being improved, and why it’s so vital to fighting climate change.
The network of transmission lines that carry electricity across the U.S. is old and not set up to meet the anticipated demand for clean energy sources like wind and solar.
Currently, electricity generation results in 32% of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, mostly from burning fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas. Those fuels are transported and burned where electricity is needed.
But inexpensive emissions-free sources of energy, like solar and wind, are only abundant in places where the sun shines or wind blows, and that’s not necessarily close to homes and businesses. Moreover, demand for electricity is going to rise as fossil fuels are gradually replaced for a whole host of other uses, such as electric vehicles and heat pumps.
Keeping the lights on and the air clean will require a lot of new transmission.
‘A double whammy’: Age and location
Most of the U.S. electric grid was built in the 1960s and 1970s. Currently, over 70% of the U.S. electricity grid is more than 25 years old, according to the White House.
That creates “vulnerability,” the U.S. Department of Energy said in an announcement of an initiative included in President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to catalyze investment in the nation’s grid.
In 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, U.S. electricity customers were without power for slightly longer than seven hours on average, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. More than five of those seven hours were during what the EIA calls “major events,” including snowstorms, hurricanes, and wildfires. That’s a significant rise from the three-to-four-hour average for outages between 2013 (the first year the data is available) and 2016, and the main culprit is extreme weather.
“Extreme weather events like the Dixie Wildfire, Hurricane Ida, and the 2021 Texas Freeze have made it clear that America’s existing energy infrastructure will not endure the continuing impacts of extreme weather events spurred by climate change,” the U.S. Department of Energy said.
Transmission infrastructure lasts between 50 and 80 years, according to a 2021 presentation from the advisory firm, the Brattle Group. Replacing transmission infrastructure that’s reaching its age limit is likely to costing an estimated $10 billion a year, according to the Brattle Group analysis.
American Electric Power, an energy company that owns 40,000 miles of transmission miles, has said 30% of its transmission lines will need replacement over the next 10 years, as highlighted by a 2022 report from the transmission policy group, Grid Strategies.
In addition to the increasing age, the location of the existing transmission lines is a problem.
Fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas are typically transported by railroads or pipelines, then burned in power plants near cities.
The electricity industry in the U.S. grew up through a patchwork of local utility companies meeting local demand, Rob Gramlich, the founder of Grid Strategies, told CNBC. The system of transmission lines in the U.S. was built to serve that model of energy generation.
Clean energy sources, like wind and solar, do not release greenhouse gas emissions, but the energy generated must be moved from where the wind and sun are strongest to where the electricity is actually used.
Wind resources in the United States, according to the the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.
That’s especially true for tapping into the highest quality of wind energy, explained Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins, a macro-scale energy systems engineer.
“Wind turbine power scales with the wind speed cubed. That means the best wind power sites are eight times more productive than the worst ones, versus just twice as productive for solar,” Jenkins said.
“That greater degree of variation in wind power potential means we need to build wind farms where it’s really windy, and that tends to not be where too many people live! So wind power development is a big driver of expanded transmission needs,” Jenkins told CNBC.
It’s easier to build solar panels close to where they are needed, but “not so for wind farms,” Jenkins said.
The combination of an aging infrastructure that needs costly upgrades and an energy grid doesn’t go where clean — and cheap — forms of renewable energy are located is “unfortunately a double whammy for consumers,” Gramlich told CNBC.
“But consumers benefit from the cheap generation that transmission enables,” Gramlich said. He advocates for replacing old infrastructure with advanced technology that can handle next generation transmission needs.
“It would be such a waste to replace old assets with replacements of the same capacity and quality,” Gramlich said.
Solar resources in the United States, according to the the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Demand will build fast
In the 1960s and 1970s, electricity construction boomed in both the United States and in Europe, said Konstantin Staschus, who has been focusing on the issue of transmission for his entire career, both in California and Europe.
“Those were the times when California was planning to have a nuclear power plant every 100 miles or so up and down the coast, many more than they ended up building in reality, because they kept projecting 7% annual electricity demand increases, which they used to have in the 60s, into the indefinite future,” Staschus told CNBC. “And they thought they would need generation and transmission coming out of the ears to cover future demands.”
But during and after the oil shocks of the 1970’s, the U.S. dramatically reduced its own energy demand. “Demand growth essentially dropped to 1 or 2% rather than seven and more or less stayed there,” he told CNBC.
From the late 1970’s through the early 2000’s, the U.S. transmission grid expanded at about 2% per year, Jenkins told CNBC.
Now, demand for electricity is going to increase rapidly as efforts to respond to global warming and mitigate the effects of climate change ramp up.
Demand for electricity in 2030 will be 14% to 19% higher than 2021 levels, according to an analysis from REPEAT(Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Analysis Toolkit), an energy policy project Jenkins is part of leading, and 27% to 39% higher by 2035, Jenkins said.
“A 21st century grid has to accommodate steadily rising electricity demand to power electric vehicles, heat pumps, industrial electrification and hydrogen electrolysis, and it needs to extend to new parts of the country to harness the best wind and solar resources. Both factors mean we simply need a bigger grid with more long-distance transmission,” Jenkins told CNBC.
“Throw in resiliency benefits of stronger inter-regional grid connections so a region that’s struggling with a extreme event can call on its neighbors for help, and you’ve got even more reason to build a stronger, bigger grid,” Jenkins said.
Tesla has launched a new accessory enabling you to “Macgyver” a couple of power outlets from the Cybertruck’s charge port.
It appears to be designed for the new cheaper Cybertruck, which doesn’t have power outlets in its bed.
Earlier this week, Tesla launched the Cybertruck Long Range RWD: a new, cheaper, and badly nerfed version of the electric pickup truck.
The new version is extremely disappointing as it is $9,000 more expensive than the Cybertruck RWD was supposed to be, and while it has more range than originally planned, Tesla has removed a ton of features, including some important ones.
Here’s what you lose with the Cybertruck RWD:
- You get a single motor RWD instead of Dual Motor AWD
- You lose the adaptive air suspension
- No motorized tonneau, but you have an optional $750 soft tonneau
- Textile seats instead of vegan leather
- Fewer speakers
- No rear screen for the backseat
- No power outlets in the bed
The last one has been pretty disappointing, as it can’t be that expensive to include, and Tesla is basically removing $20,000 worth of features for only a $10,000 difference with the Dual Motor Cybertruck.
But the automaker appears to have come up with a partial solution.
Tesla has launched a $80 ‘Powershare Outlet Adapter’ on its online store:
When combined with Tesla’s Gen 3 Mobile Connector plugged into the Cybertruck’s charge port, it gives you two 120V 20A power outlets.
Tesla describes the product:
Powershare Outlet Adapter allows you to power electronic devices using Mobile Connector and your Powershare-equipped vehicle’s battery. To use this adapter, plug Mobile Connector’s handle into your Powershare-equipped vehicle’s charge port and connect the adapter to the other end of your Mobile Connector. You can then use this adapter to plug in any compatible electronic device you want to power.
For now, Tesla says that this only works for the Cybertruck and you have to buy the $300 mobile charging connector, which doesn’t come with the truck.
Electrek’s Take
I guess it’s better than nothing, but I’m still super disappointed in the new trim. It makes no sense right now.
Not only you lose the 2x 120V, 1x 240V outlets in the bed, but you also lose the 2x 120V outlets in the cabin. Now, you can can pay $380 to have a “Macgyver” solution for 2 120V outlets in the back.
I’m convinced that Tesla designed this trim simply to make the $80,000 Cybertruck AWD look better value-wise.
It looks like Tesla took out about $20,000 worth of features while giving buyers only a $10,000 discount.
It’s just the latest example of Tesla losing its edge.
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The International Maritime Organization, a UN agency which regulates maritime transport, has voted to implement a global cap on carbon emissions from ocean shipping and a penalty on entities that exceed that limit.
After a weeklong meeting of the Marine Environment Protection Committee of the IMO and decades of talks, countries have voted to implement binding carbon reduction targets including a gradually-reducing cap on emissions and associated penalties for exceeding that cap.
Previously, the IMO made another significant environmental move when it transitioned the entire shipping industry to lower-sulfur fuels in 2020, moving towards improving a longstanding issue with large ships outputting extremely high levels of sulfur dioxide emissions, which harm human health and cause acid rain.
Today’s agreement makes the shipping industry the first sector to agree on an internationally mandated target to reduce emissions along with a global carbon price.
The agreement includes standards for greenhouse gas intensity from maritime shipping fuels, with those standards starting in 2028 and reducing through 2035. The end goal is to reach net-zero emissions in shipping by 2050.
Companies that exceed the carbon limits set by the standard will have to pay either $100 or $380 per excess ton of emissions, depending on how much they exceed limits by. These numbers are roughly in line with the commonly-accepted social cost of carbon, which is an attempt to set the equivalent cost borne by society by every ton of carbon pollution.
Money from these penalties will be put into a fund that will reward lower-emissions ships, research into cleaner fuels, and support nations that are vulnerable to climate change.
That means that this agreement represents a global “carbon price” – an attempt to make polluters pay the costs that they shift onto everyone else by polluting.
Why carbon prices matter
The necessity of a carbon price has long been acknowledged by virtually every economist. In economic terms, pollution is called a “negative externality,” where a certain action imposes costs on a party that isn’t responsible for the action itself. That action can be thought of as a subsidy – it’s a cost imposed by the polluter that isn’t being paid by the polluter, but rather by everyone else.
Externalities distort a market because they allow certain companies to get away with cheaper costs than they should otherwise have. And a carbon price is an attempt to properly price that externality, to internalize it to the polluter in question, so that they are no longer being subsidized by everyone else’s lungs. This also incentivizes carbon reductions, because if you can make something more cleanly, you can make it more cheaply.
Many people have suggested implementing a carbon price, including former republican leadership (before the party forgot literally everything about how economics works), but political leadership has been hesitant to do what’s needed because it fears the inevitable political backlash driven by well-funded propaganda entities in the oil industry.
For that reason, most carbon pricing schemes have focused on industrial processes, rather than consumer goods. This is currently happening in Canada, which recently (unwisely) retreated from its consumer carbon price but still maintains a price on the largest polluters in the oil industry.
But until today’s agreement by the IMO, there had been no global agreement of the same in any industry. There are single-country carbon prices, and international agreements between certain countries or subnational entities, often in the form of “cap-and-trade” agreements which implement penalties, and where companies that reduce emissions earn credits that they can then sell to companies that exceed limits (California has a similar program in partnership with with Quebec), but no previous global carbon price in any industry.
Carbon prices opposed by enemies of life on Earth
Unsurprisingly, entities that favor destruction of life on Earth, such as the oil industry and those representing it (Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the bought-and-paid oil stooge who is illegally squatting in the US Oval Office), opposed these measures, claiming they would be “unworkable.”
Meanwhile, island nations whose entire existence is threatened by climate change (along with the ~2 billion people who will have to relocate by the end of the century due to rising seas) correctly said that the move isn’t strong enough, and that even stronger action is needed to avoid the worse effects of climate change.
The island nations’ position is backed by science, the oil companies’ position is not.
While these new standards are historic and need to be lauded as the first agreement of their kind, there is still more work to be done and incentives that need to be offered to ensure that greener technologies are available to help fulfill the targets. Jesse Fahnestock, Director of Decarbonisation at the Global Maritime Forum, said:
While the targets are a step forward, they will need to be improved if they are to drive the rapid fuel shift that will enable the maritime sector to reach net zero by 2050. While we applaud the progress made, meeting the targets will require immediate and decisive investments in green fuel technology and infrastructure. The IMO will have opportunities to make these regulations more impactful over time, and national and regional policies also need to prioritise scalable e-fuels and the infrastructure needed for long-term decarbonisation.
One potential solution could be IMO’s “green corridors,” attempts to establish net-zero-emission shipping routes well in advance of the IMO’s 2050 net-zero target.
And, of course, this is only one industry, and one with a relatively low contribution to global emissions. While the vast majority of global goods are shipped over the ocean, it’s still responsible for only around 3% of global emissions. To see the large emissions reductions we need to avoid the worst effects of climate change, other more-polluting sectors – like automotive, agriculture (specifically animal agriculture), construction and heating – all could use their own carbon price to help add a forcing factor to drive down their emissions.
Lets hope that the IMO’s move sets that example, and we see more of these industries doing the right thing going forward (and ignoring those enemies of life on Earth listed above).
The agreement still has to go through a final step of approval on October, but this looks likely to happen.
Even without a carbon price, many homeowners can save money on their electricity bills today by going solar. And if you’re considering going solar, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
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