Renewable energy is bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands. Achieving a goal of getting 20% of our electricity from wind would require moving large amounts of power over long distances, from the windy, lightly populated plains in the middle of the country to the coasts where many people live. Solar-power stations in the nation’s deserts  pose the same transmission problems.

Many transmission lines, and the connections among them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles. Today’s grid is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power across small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads. What we need, as FERC member Sudeen Kelley says, is “an interstate transmission superhighway system.”

But the grid is balkanized, with about 200,000 miles, or 322,000 kilometers, of power lines divided among 500 owners. States have traditionally exercised authority over the grid but have little incentive to push improvements that would benefit neighboring states. Big transmission upgrades often involve multiple companies, many state governments, and numerous permits. Construction costs are astronomical, and every addition to the grid provokes fights with property owners who do not want to look at a line of power pylons marching across their landscape.

Our rickety grid would have to be transformed if we are to ever achieve  an all-electric automobile fleet.  But that’s just one problem with the dream.

As Richard Heinman points out, cars are inherently inefficient. We can make them smaller and lighter. We can power them with renewable electrons instead of nasty old hydrocarbons. But in the final analysis, pushing a ton or three of steel down the highway just to move a two-hundred pound person to and from a shopping mall is both wasteful and plain stupid in a multitude of ways.

Heinberg consider just two: tires and asphalt.

“Tires are made largely of non-renewable petroleum, and after 40,000 miles or so they tend to wear out. Americans discard them at a rate of one tire per person per year.

“Then there’s the stuff that roads are made of. We build roads compulsively so as to give our precious cars more places to roam, but those roads also soon wear out, so we have to constantly repair them; this requires enormous amounts of asphalt (25 million tons annually in the US). But asphalt is, once again, a petroleum product, and as oil gets scarce the building and maintenance of roads becomes unmanageable.”

“Electric cars are a sparky idea if you consider only what they are designed to replace. But we really need to be thinking about how to reduce our need for motorized transport altogether by redesigning our cities and shortening our supply chains. And where something more than a scooter is necessary, we should move people and freight by rail or water rather than by highway.”

What if we were to electrify and improve the nation’s rail network, use rail corridors to double as electric transmission corridors, and site wind farms along rail corridors as well?

click to enlarge image

Switching trains from diesel to electric power would itself save substantial amounts of oil.  But those fuel savings would be dwarfed by the savings from switching freight from trucks to electric rail – not to mention diverting passenger miles from autos to electric rail, which might even happen if rail service were worthy of the name.

Alan Drake at The Oil Drum calculates that a large enough investment would result in saving 2.3 to 2.4 million barrels/day – or 12% of U.S. oil consumption.

A huge ancillary benefit would be the upgrading of the U.S. electrical grid, which is dangerously creaky and needs to be rebuilt anyway to transmit energy from renewable sources such as wind, wave, and solar. Routing transmission lines is one of the most difficult and controversial problems that arise in the siting of any new energy facility. Utilizing existing rights-of-way could simplify that process immensely.

A new DOE report – “20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply” - concludes that it’s feasible for wind energy to contribute one-fifth of the total U.S. electricity supply by 2030.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress lists the key conclusions:

• Annual installations need to increase by only a factor of three from current levels by 2018.
• Costs of integrating intermittent wind power into the grid are modest. 20 percent wind can be reliably integrated into the grid for less than 0.5 cents per kWh.
• No material constraints currently exist. Although demand for copper, fiberglass and other raw materials will increase, achieving 20 percent wind is not limited by the availability of raw materials.
• This would require 300,000 MW of wind, delivering electricity for about 6 to 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour, unsubsidized (i.e. no federal tax credit) and including the cost of transmission to access existing power lines within 500 miles of wind resource [new nuclear is currently about 15 cents/kwh (see here)].
• The 20% Wind Scenario could require an incremental investment of as little as $43 billion NPV [net present value] more than the base-case no new Wind Scenario. This would represent less than 0.06 cent (6 one-hundredths of 1 cent) per kilowatt-hour of total generation by 2030, or roughly 50 cents per month per household

Romm says that key benefit is that carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25% in 2030. But this isn’t such good news after all – avoided emissions would merely “nearly level projected growth in CO2 emissions from the electricity sector.”

In other words, emissions would continue to grow – just not as much as they otherwise would. We would be far from on track to meet the 80% reductions necessary to keep atmospheric CO2 at ~450 ppm, much less the level of reductions necessary to stabilize CO2 at 350 ppm, the level necessary to avoid an unacceptable risk of climate catastrophe.

Robert Rapier at R-Squared Energy Blog has undertaken to calculate whether it would be feasible to use solar power to generate enough energy to offset all U.S. gasoline consumption. He concludes that it will take about 444,000 megawatts of electrical generating capacity. Current U.S. generating capacity is over 900,000 megawatts – but there’s little to spare.

He calculates that to generate 444,000 megawatts with solar PV would require just under 1,300 square miles (a 36 mile by 36 mile square) of just PV surface area. To generate that much power with solar thermal – including supporting infrastructure – would require 4,719 square miles (a 69 mile by 69 mile square).

A large area, but not impossible to envision. That’s almost exactly the area of Los Angeles County – and we’ve easily covered pretty much all of that area with built environment.

If you expect that plug in cars will save the day and allow our happy motoring republic to continue in its business-as-usual mode, you may want to check out what these graphics (courtesy of Gail Tverberg at The Oil Drum) are saying about the current state of our electrical supply & distribution system.

click to enlarge

click to enlarge