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posted by janrinok on Tuesday November 23 2021, @08:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-giving-the-idea-a-plug dept.

Macrogrid study: Big value in connecting America's eastern and western power grids:

Those seven threads (technically, they're back-to-back, high-voltage, direct-current connections) join America's Eastern and Western interconnections and have 1,320 megawatts of electric-power handling capacity. (The seam separating the grids runs, roughly, from eastern Montana, down the western borders of South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas and along the western edges of the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. Texas, with its own grid, is mostly outside the two big grids.)

And they are big grids -- the eastern grid has a generating capacity of 700,000 megawatts and the western 250,000 megawatts. So, up to 1,320 megawatts isn't much electricity moving between the two.

But what if there were bigger connections between the two grids? What if more power moved back and forth? Could that move Iowa wind power, Southwest solar power and Eastern off-shore wind power from coast to coast? Could the West help the East meet its peak demand, and vice versa? Would bigger connections boost grid reliability, resilience and adaptability? Would the benefits exceed the costs?

The short answer: Yes.

That's according to the Interconnections Seam Study, a two-year, $1.5 million study launched as part of a $220 million Grid Modernization Initiative announced in January 2016 by the U.S. Department of Energy.

[...] "The results show benefit-to-cost ratios that reach as high as 2.5, indicating significant value to increasing the transmission capacity between the interconnections under the cases considered, realized through sharing generation resources and flexibility across regions," says a summary of the latest paper.

"So, for every dollar invested, you get up to $2.50 back," said James McCalley, an Iowa State Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering, the Jack London Chair in Power Systems Engineering and a co-author of the papers.

How much would you have to invest? McCalley said it would take an estimated $50 billion to build what researchers are calling a "macrogrid" of major transmission lines that loop around the Midwest and West, with branches filling in the middle and connecting to Texas and the Southeast.

Journal References:
1.) Aaron Bloom, Josh Novacheck, Gregory L. Brinkman, et al. The Value of Increased HVDC Capacity Between Eastern and Western U.S. Grids: The Interconnections Seam Study, (DOI: 10.1109/TPWRS.2021.3115092)
2.) Armando L. Figueroa Acevedo, Ali Jahanbani-Ardakani, Hussam Nosair, et al. Design and Valuation of High-Capacity HVDC Macrogrid Transmission for the Continental US, (DOI: 10.1109/TPWRS.2020.2970865)


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  • (Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday November 23 2021, @10:47AM (5 children)

    by Dr Spin (5239) on Tuesday November 23 2021, @10:47AM (#1198848)

    1,000 megawatts is one gigawatt.

    It is not rocket science (or maybe it is ???).

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 23 2021, @11:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 23 2021, @11:25AM (#1198852)

    when doing that would make one of the figures 1.32GW, it doesn't really make it any clearer.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Freeman on Tuesday November 23 2021, @04:01PM

    by Freeman (732) on Tuesday November 23 2021, @04:01PM (#1198918) Journal

    From a marketing perspective 250,000 MW is 250,000 times better than 1 GW.

    https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions [awrestaurants.com]

    Confused why A&W's burgers weren't able to compete even though the burgers were priced the same as their competitors, Taubuman brought in a market research firm.

    The firm eventually conducted a focus group to discover the truth: participants were concerned about the price of the burger. "Why should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat?" they asked.

    It turns out the majority of participants incorrectly believed one-third of a pound was actually smaller than a quarter of a pound.

    Despite the confusion, Taubman took an important lesson from the experience: "Sometimes the messages we send to our customers through marketing and sales information are not as clear and compelling as we think they are."

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  • (Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday November 23 2021, @06:08PM (2 children)

    by cmdrklarg (5048) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 23 2021, @06:08PM (#1198968)

    We'll need 1.21 jiggawatts. Great Scott!

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    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 23 2021, @09:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 23 2021, @09:50PM (#1199042)

      Nigga what?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @06:09AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @06:09AM (#1199170)

      Back when I first learned the prefixes "giga-" had a soft "G" and sounded like "jigga." Dr. Brown was probably in the same boat. I'm not exactly sure when it changed. Looking in my memory I remember it used to be a soft "g" for a long time and then suddenly it wasn't. It feels like it literally changed overnight in the late 80s or early 90s.