Price Tag in Customer Rates?
Branko Terzic, Sc.D. Engineering (Hon.) is a former Commissioner on the Wisconsin Public Service Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He also was Chairman, President and CEO of a regulated utility and holding company.
R. Bruce Williamson, PhD. is Senior Fellow, Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida. He was Commissioner with the Maine Public Utilities Commission following a career in energy and utility markets and telecommunications in the U.S. and internationally.
The rapid expansion of the U.S. transmission grid is the centerpiece of efforts to reach full electrification of the U.S. economy and net-zero decarbonization goals by 2050. Over the last two decades, the attention of the public was first drawn to the importance of renewable generation, and now there are seventeen hundred gigawatts of renewable generation in queue, thirty percent more than traditional generation plant.
More recently, our attention is being directed to the urgency of getting green electrons from utility scale solar and wind farms to distant markets in time to meet national and state decarbonization targets. The solution for moving wind and solar electrons to market is to build extraordinary amounts of transmission, storage, and distribution circuits in twenty-six years or less.
With limits on local patience and the improbability of siting enough large intermittent generation sources close to the more densely populated areas of the U.S., many terawatt hours of green electrons need to flow reliably over regional operator boundaries and constraints. That is hundreds or thousands of miles to electric ratepayers and customers who wait for those electrons to light, heat, and cool their buildings and residences, energize transportation, and power their industries.