Will the U.S. Finally Get a Unified Power Grid?It is a decades-old dream: a single, vast North American electric grid, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Mexico to the Arctic Circle. Such a continent-wide supergrid would let officials transmit the tens of gigawatts of wind-generated power from the Great Plains to cities on both coasts.
An ambitious project known as Tres Amigas, eight years in the making, is finally getting under way. Eventually it will link the three largest North American grids: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection, which together cover the lower 48 states plus 8 Canadian provinces. Tres Amigas, located in eastern New Mexico, where the three grids converge, will be a transmission “superstation,” able to transfer up to 20 gigawatts of electricity in almost any direction.
Last November, construction workers began building the first piece of the first phase of the project: a 56-kilometer transmission line to connect three new wind farms to the superstation site and then to the Blackwater substation, which connects to the Western grid. The 345-kilovolt line is scheduled to be electrified by the end of 2016. The ultimate plan is to construct three more lines to substations in Texas, one of which connects to the Texas grid and the other two connecting to the Eastern grid.
Three Become One: The Tres Amigas superstation, now under construction outside Clovis, N.M., aims to interconnect the three main power grids of North America.
The four sets of transmission lines would converge at Tres Amigas, a 58-square-kilometer site where the company will install high-voltage DC converters for converting AC to DC and back again, plus a modest 5 MW of storage for regulating voltage and frequency. As more partners sign on, additional converters and storage can be added. Other plans call for an electricity-market hub to let traders take advantage of the differences in electricity prices between regions. On 10 August 2015, for instance, the price difference between ERCOT and the Western grid hit $2,331.54 per megawatt-hour. Capitalizing on such disparities should generally lower rates for customers and stimulate more investment.
Having a high-voltage DC node that connects existing AC networks—a configuration called an HVDC overlay—will make the entire grid more stable and responsive to outages and faults. "Very large integrated AC systems tend to get wobbly. An HVDC overlay, with its ability to move a lot of power quickly, will provide a huge reliability enhancement as the electricity grid grows.” Grid operators in Western Europe are already installing or planning a number of these HVDC overlays, he adds. China and India are going even further, installing transmission grids based entirely on HVDC. A few links already exist between the main U.S. grids. But Tres Amigas would bring together all three grids in one place and at much higher power levels.
"Life is going to get a lot more interesting as renewables replace fossil-fuel plants, and we’ll need to move large blocks of power to where generation is suddenly insufficient. A project like Tres Amigas will make us evolve the way we need to evolve.”
ROCKMAN wrote:syn - Sorry: meant ED...eminent domain.
Farmer: about Perry...you need to understand how the Texas state govt is designed. In reality the governor has little control. Actually the Lt. governor has a much greater impact: he's elected separately from the governor and runs the state senate. The senate is where all the power exist. And they don't get re-elected if they don't keep the voters happy.
Again it's not complicated: it just common sense BUSINESS decisions. Which might not always be very environmentally friendly and often not very politically correct. But this is Texas after all and in general folks here don't really give a f*ck what others think of them. LOL.
efarmer wrote: I liken it to getting on an airliner and looking in the cockpit and there's a chimp with a Captain's hat on. If i catch your drift, the chimp has Chuck Yeager sitting in the copilot seat, so all is well.
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