| High Voltage: Clean Energy and the Transmission Hurdle Posted by Keith Johnson Wind power’s march to maturity is perpetually dogged by one hurdle even bigger than the eternal debate over clean-energy tax credits: How to move the juice. The Department of Energy’s warned about it, T. Boone Pickens is trying to deal with it, and Al Gore’s aware it stands in the way of his grand plan to power America with 100% clean energy. Just how tricky will it be to tackle the transmission issue? Today, two big U.S. utilities—Duke Energy and American Electric Power—announced a joint venture to build 240 miles of high-voltage transmission line in Indiana. The new lines are needed, the companies said, to handle the wind power that’s expected to come online in coming years—wind farms, more even than other power stations, are generally remote from population centers. If the Duke/AEP deal is anything to go by, overhauling the U.S. transmission network to make it wind-friendly will be neither cheap nor quick. Duke and AEP said the new venture will cost an estimated $1 billion. Ratepayers in the Midwest and the Mid-atlantic regions will pick up the tab for that. Securing land rights and regulatory approval, and drafting the line’s route means it won’t be completed until 2014 at the earliest—meaning it will take about nine times longer to build than a typical wind farm it’s meant to serve. And that’s just for one part of Indiana. Which is to say that shifting America’s entire energy mix to renewables like wind and solar power isn’t as easy as flicking a switch. Even if that’s exactly the image clean-energy proponents are using to drum up support. Al Gore’s “We” campaign will air a new ad tonight during the Olympic Games, called “Switch,” in which all kinds of people take part in a new event: pushing a 25-foot high white light switch. The ad says: “The answer is simple. To power our country with 100% clean energy in ten years, all we need is your help.” That, and a few hundred billion dollars of new investment in transmission lines. [Read More] |
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