Other places have better power grid technology. Here's why we lag behind - Greater Baton Rouge Business Report

Other places have better power grid technology. Here’s why we lag behind

Of the many challenges confronting the nation’s aging, straining electric grid, the need for a lot of new transmission capacity is among the most pressing, experts and policymakers say.

In Louisiana, where power outages abound, and Entergy Louisiana has already instituted a monthly fee for improvements and repairs to the state’s power grid, this national discussion can have significant impact on businesses and residents of the state.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Energy said the nation will need thousands of miles of new lines to better link regions to handle extreme weather, reduce costs and connect new renewable energy projects.

But building a new interregional transmission line can take a decade or more—chiefly because of siting and permitting delays, local resistance, planning problems, cost allocation and other obstacles.

And while Congress has taken some steps on permitting reform (in this summer’s debt limit deal), there’s a suite of technologies that proponents and some state and federal regulators agree could get more out of the existing transmission system right now and potentially reduce the need for new wires.

They’re called “grid-enhancing technologies,” or GETs in industry shorthand, and in many cases they’ve been embraced elsewhere but have been slower to take root in the U.S.

“If we don’t squeeze every drop out of the existing system, it’s going to be a tough sell as we consider the costs involved in transmission expansion,” says Dan Scripps, chair of Michigan’s utility commission, at a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission task force meeting last month. “And I believe that grid-enhancing technologies can help us do that to maximize the value from the infrastructure that we have today.

Grid-enhancing technologies include a variety of tools to maximize the ability of the grid to handle the flow of electricity. They include sensors, power-flow devices, software and hardware that can better deliver real-time weather data and other technologies like topology optimization, which can identify the best grid configurations and route power flow around bottlenecks.

There was broad consensus at the seventh meeting last month of FERC’s Joint Federal-State Task Force on Electric Transmission that GETs could yield big cost and reliability benefits for grid operators and electric customers.

So why aren’t these types of technologies more prevalent in the United States?

The biggest reason, grid experts say, is how utilities earn money for grid upgrades and how their performance is measured. Read the full story from Louisiana Illuminator.