Texas can unlock clean energy
Smaller grids, connected seamlessly, would create reliability
Iset out to write a very different book than the one that published last week. It would have been called “Climate of Opportunities” and profiled innovators who found opportunities for profit while confronting climate change.
With classes out for the summer of 2017, I headed to downtown Houston to conduct my first interview.
“Well who the hell is making any money at this?” Michael Skelly retorted upon hearing my premise. The tall and bespectacled entrepreneur had treated me and a former-student-turned-employee to sandwiches in the conference room of Clean Line Energy, the company he founded in 2009.
Clean Line aimed to build power lines stretching hundreds of miles from the windswept terrain of the central United States to cities such as Memphis, Chicago and Los Angeles. Each anticipated line had a clever name befitting the grand plan: Rock Island, Grainbelt Express, Western Spirit, Centennial West and Plains & Eastern. But by the time of our lunch, not a single line had been built. It stayed that way until 2019, when Clean Line shuttered that office. Opposition from land owners, utility executives and politicians stymied its every move.
Maybe creative entrepreneurs aren’t enough, I reasoned. So I scrapped my first book proposal. Then another. Finally, I settled on an idea that convinced me and a publisher: Far more than business plans will be needed on the road to clean energy. Policy, technology and diplomacy must all play a role.
A hundred interviews later, “Confronting Climate Gridlock” is the book that emerged. By the end of the process, including living through Hurricane Harvey and a massive Texas grid failure, I had come back to the question of power lines and the idea of a supergrid. But I was convinced a different approach than the one Clean Line had pursued — one that emphasized smaller connections between existing grids and avoided unnecessary turf battles — was the key. And it was clear that no matter how much our grids are better-connected, it’s also essential that we find ways to power them with cleaner energy going forward.
Power lines spanning several states have their merits. With the costs of wind power plummeting by 72 percent and solar by 90 percent since 2009, wind and solar farms can now generate electricity more
cheaply than anything else. But they won’t be built without a way to bring their power to market.
Our nation’s biggest power lines were built mostly to connect the biggest power plants of the past century — towering hydroelectric dams, nuclear reactors, and coal and gas burning facilities — to the cities and factories that need power most. Too few lines serve regions where land is cheap and winds and sunshine are strongest. And power lines are confined within the borders of the three main grids — one stretching from California to Montana and western Canada; another stretching from Florida to the Dakotas and eastern Canada; and a standalone grid in Texas that operates as an island unto itself. The western and eastern grids are balkanized into zones managed by different operators, with too few lines and coordination between them.
Our antiquated grids do need updating, but as Skelly and Clean Line learned the hard way, thousand-mile lines aren’t the shortest path to doing so. The longer the line, the more property owners, neighbors and politicians might object along the route.
Learning from Uri
Instead, what’s needed most are shorter lines stitching the seams of our existing grids, creating what some have called a “supergrid.” That would mean our three main grids, currently isolated from one another, could begin to share electricity with each other. That in turn would allow power to be provided moment by moment from wherever it’s windiest and sunniest.
This stitching would not have stopped the massive power failure that left millions of Texans shivering in the dark during last February’s freeze. But as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s report on the storm noted, connections to other grids could have helped end those blackouts sooner by bringing in power from neighboring states once they recovered from their own initial struggles. The report is right to call for studies on adding interconnections.
Of course, deep freezes are rare around here. That’s what pulled me back south after four winters in New England. When the weather is milder, Texas could be exporting wind and solar power to the rest of the country. There’s no reason that what’s made in Texas needs to stay in Texas, as we’ve learned with every other form of energy. And we could be making a whole lot more wind and solar power if only there were more power lines within Texas and beyond it.
More than 130 gigawatts of wind and solar projects — enough to nearly quadruple ERCOT’s renewable power capacity — now sit in the grid operator’s queue. But most of them won’t be built unless transmission bottlenecks are cleared. Research by my group has shown that a mere fraction of those projects would be enough to replace all the coal power plants in Texas, halting their deadly effects on our health and climate. It’s not always sunny and windy, but most of the time it’s either sunny or windy somewhere in Texas. And when it’s not, our existing nuclear plants and new options such as batteries, geothermal and connections with other grids can cleanly fill in the gaps to let us quit coal and ease our reliance on natural gas.
With the new stitching tying America’s major grids into a supergrid, complementary output from solar and wind could supply well over half of the nation’s power needs, slashing costs and emissions. But even with easy transmission of energy from one part to another, solar and wind alone are not likely to provide all the power that’s needed. In northern regions, sunshine can be weak and winds stagnant for long stretches of the winter, when heating demand is high. Germans dub this “dunkelflaute,” or the dark doldrums. Even in milder weather, winds are occasionally slow at night.
Right now, those gaps are filled by coal, which is fast being phased out due to cost and environmental concerns, and natural gas, which is cleaner but still produces greenhouse gases.
For many decades, hydropower and nuclear were our main sources of fossil-free electricity, and indeed maintaining their output will be crucial. But we’re not building any big new dams. Two nuclear reactors under construction in Georgia would be the nation’s first since the 1970s. They’re running six years behind schedule and more than two times over budget. South Carolina canceled plans for two reactors after wasting $9 billion. Although Bill Gates and others are pursuing designs for small modular reactors, they’re unlikely to build much more than pilot projects for at least another decade. And the world still lacks any long-term repositories for nuclear waste, or a way to fully protect plants from tsunamis or military attacks.
Consequently, new builds of dams and nuclear plants unlikely to help much in achieving President Biden’s goal of 100 percent clean electricity by 2035. Yet clean electricity is crucial to decarbonizing energy overall. Without it, there’s little reason to electrify cars and heating and industries. Clean and cheap electricity is also crucial to making hydrogen and eventually capturing carbon from the air.
Promising alternatives
While dimming my views of nuclear energy, research for my book left me hopeful that geothermal could be on the cusp of a breakthrough. It’s easy to overlook geothermal, since it provides less than half a percent of the nation’s electricity today. Most geothermal plants were built decades ago at rare sites where heat is so shallow that steam can be seen rising from the ground.
Drilling technologies pioneered by the oil and gas industry can be repurposed to access reservoirs of hot fluids deep beneath the surface, opening vast swaths of the western U.S. and even east Texas to geothermal exploration. That’s why entrepreneurs like Tim Latimer are choosing Texas to launch their geothermal companies, drawing on the expertise from local industries. Over the course of my research, I saw Latimer leap from participating in a cleantech incubator program in California to landing eight-figure deals with Bill Gates and Google here in Texas.
Companies such as Google are increasingly committing to purchasing clean electricity on a 24/7 basis, which can’t be met by wind and solar. That’s creating a market niche for geothermal, even while it remains about twice as costly as wind and solar. Early adopters can drive down costs through “learning by doing” as technologies scale up.
That progress in finding new ways to power our grid should sound a note of optimism. Cost and time are of the essence, however. If we can’t make clean energy cheap and reliable here soon, it won’t be attractive in less wealthy countries. Since U.S. emissions have dwindled to just one-seventh of the global total, we won’t be able to slow global warming unless other countries clean up, too.
My book spans many dimensions of the battle against climate change globally — the diplomacy behind the Paris Agreement; the technologies needed to power cleaner cars and industries; the gridlocked politics of climate legislation.
As much as I try to focus on solutions, I recognize they will be challenging to implement.
The opportunities represented by a clean supergrid — with Texas often serving as its pulsing powerhouse — can help us see a way through climate gridlock. The supergrid is a big idea but getting there could involve a series of smaller steps that bring together new technologies and smart ways to navigate bureaucracy. Skelly, it turns out, hasn’t given up. He thinks he was too early with
Clean Line, and has recently started a new company with a similar mission called Grid United.
In the end, I didn’t write the feel-good set of profiles that I had envisioned in 2017. But I have a new kind of hope that the United States can chart a path to cleaner energy and help rein in the emissions that are warming the climate.