Building Clean, Competitive Grids

A clean energy future is within reach, but only if we build it

To decarbonize our lives, we must swap our fossil fuel-powered products with electric ones — and power them with a carbon-free grid. As RMI has long advocated, efficiency and distributed energy resources, like rooftop and community solar, will play important roles. However, the scale and urgency of the decarbonization challenge — and the massive increase in projected electricity demand from data centers, extreme temperatures, and electrification — mean that small-scale solutions will be insufficient to reliably, affordably, and equitably meet the challenge.

We must also build larger-scale, clean, and inexpensive resources like solar, wind, and battery storage – and the long-distance transmission lines to move electricity to where it is needed and share electricity across state and regional borders. These will allow us to rapidly cut emissions while maintaining a reliable and affordable grid for everyone. Transmission expansion is also a key enabler for the grid to support a high penetration of distributed energy resources. Fortunately, we have all the technical solutions available — we just need to deploy them.

Why large- and small-scale solutions?

RMI has spent decades advancing energy efficiency, small- and medium-scale distributed energy resources, virtual power plants, and customer-owned solutions such as rooftop solar, electric vehicles, energy efficiency upgrades, demand side energy management, and energy storage.

However, we also recognize the urgency to build clean energy at scale. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory showed that even if we managed to put solar panels on every technically suitable roof in the country, we would meet less than 40 percent of today’s electricity demand — and only about 13 percent of our future clean electricity needs to replace the fossil fuels currently powering transport, buildings, and industry.

To meet the needs of the clean energy transition reliably and affordably, we will need to build vastly more large-scale solar and wind farms, as well as sufficient transmission capacity to carry the power. Importantly, such an expansion does not need to require large land use changes — a recent NREL study found that less than 1 percent of the continental US land area would be needed. Proactive planning and community engagement are necessary to ensure effective land use that prioritizes complementary uses, community benefits, conservation needs, and community needs.

Source: Princeton Net Zero America, The National Renewable Energy Laboratory

The need for infrastructure buildout

Today, across the country, over 2 terawatts of mostly wind, solar, and battery storage projects — more than the 1.25 TW of electric generation capacity online in the United States today — are waiting to connect to the grid because we do not have sufficient grid capacity to support them. Long wait times (an average of five years) and high associated costs lead to significant increases in electricity bills for American consumers, and are major reasons why many of these renewable projects are ultimately canceled, something we cannot afford as part of the clean energy transition.

To expand our grid so that it can quickly incorporate new generation, we can leverage grid-enhancing technologies, high-performance conductors, and other innovations to increase the capacity of existing transmission lines. We must also plan and build new high-voltage, long-distance lines. While such planning has in the past proven challenging, RMI believes that through collaborative stakeholder processes and bold, visionary leadership, the United States can rise to the challenge — and must do so to address the climate crisis in an equitable and affordable manner.

Source: LBNL

The need to work together

To effectively meet our decarbonization goals while maintaining grid reliability and affordability, policymakers, grid operators, and all other stakeholders must work together to build the necessary infrastructure. Crucially, we must plan and build in a way that safeguards critical habitats and cultural heritage sites and empowers local communities to participate in the transition both fairly and equitably. If we fail to act with urgency, our efforts to address climate change will fall further behind and potentially squander more than 80 percent of the Inflation Reduction Act’s potential to reduce emissions. This is why, at RMI, we are championing solutions to proactively plan and build regional and interregional transmission across the country.

Source: Princeton Net Zero America