Transmission and grid interconnection

Assembled from 23 blocks · 2 evidence · 16 related

1. Story
2. The wires, and increasingly the binding constraint. Interconnection does two things for a variable system that nothing else does as cheaply: it aggregates weather, because wind output at sites five hundred kilometres apart is far less correlated than at sites five kilometres apart, and it connects generation to load, because the best wind and solar resource is usually not where the demand is. High-voltage direct current is the tool for long distances — losses of roughly three per cent per thousand kilometres, no reactive-power limit on cable length, and controllable flow — while alternating current remains the meshed network everything else hangs from. The problem is not technical but institutional and temporal. Transmission lines take a decade or more to permit and build in most jurisdictions, against two to four years for a solar farm and eighteen months for a battery, so the queue is the bottleneck: the IEA's 2023 grids report put the volume of projects waiting in advanced-stage interconnection queues worldwide at well over a terawatt, and estimated that on the order of eighty million kilometres of grid must be added or refurbished by 2040 for announced energy and climate goals to be met. In the United States the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory queue series has tracked active interconnection requests exceeding the entire installed generating capacity of the country. Cheap generation that cannot be connected is not cheap generation.
3. Knowledge
4. Variability and intermittency in generation
5. Transmission and grid interconnection
6. Copper
7. Connections
8. Dunkelflaute (dark doldrums)
9. Variability and intermittency in generation
10. Copper
11. Changji–Guquan ±1100 kV UHVDC link
12. The Changji–Guquan ultra-high-voltage link is commissioned
13. Lithium-ion battery storage
14. Nuclear fission power
15. The duck curve
16. Dunkelflaute (dark doldrums)
17. Transmission and grid interconnection
18. German power prices spike during a December Dunkelflaute
19. Transmission and grid interconnection
20. Critical minerals for the energy transition
21. Evidence
22. Supports the finding that grid investment and permitting, rather than generation cost, has become a binding constraint on deployment, including the estimate that on the order of eighty million kilometres of grid must be added or refurbished by 2040 and that over a terawatt of projects sit in advanced-stage interconnection queues. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; both figures are stated from author knowledge of the report and are flagged as unchecked on the citing object.
23. Supports the statement that the volume of generation and storage capacity in United States interconnection queues has exceeded the country's entire installed generating capacity, and that typical queue durations have lengthened. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the comparison is stated directionally and no queue total is quoted.