“Europeans have been busy expanding their HVDC grid lines under the sea. Texas always knows how to shot itself the foot. Tres Amigas would have prevented the problems with the 2021 polar vortex which caused 331 fatalities and $200 billion in damages.”
Could be you can’t get from ‘here to there’ without going under the sea there. Britain is an island along with Ireland. To get hydro from Norway and Finland to Denmark, it’s under the sea.
Same for proposed solar power installation in Africa that would feed power to Spain and Italy.
The Tres Amigas power interconnect would have cost BILLIONS of dollars and likely only be used a few times a year. There really wasn’t much of a business case for it.
The premise was it would wheel and deal solar and wind power , generated in NM and TX, ‘elsewhere’ and charge transport fees for it. On rare occasions with strange weather patterns and historic low temps in TX…it ‘might’ find enough energy elsewhere and wheel it back to TX, maybe.
Of course, New England is sucking power now out of Ontario and Quebec since it doesn’t have enough itself.
California? Heck, power emergencies every summer…and telling people to cut back. They suck their power from OR and WA state hydro. Meanwhile, they’re shutting down their nukes.
Of course, that solar power sort of disappears every evening at sunset (and drops before) so you have no power to export …if you’ve got solar.
Meanwhile, TX has sufficient energy 364 days a year so it’s not going to be importing power frequently. Not enough and likely won’t be to export solar and wind to other places - at ‘peak’ wind season (Spring/Fall) , might generate up to 50% of immediate need…
That billions of dollar of power line just sits there most of the time.
And which generators have gigawatts of power instantly available? Last ‘incident’ in TX, - OK, LA, NM, AR had zero spare power - they had rolling blackouts. well, NM escaped - barely.
. TN was hurting. So where was gigawatts of power coming from?
No one builds ‘extra’ capacity available on demand above projected ‘peak power needs’. Rate payers don’t like that.
At times, TX now generates 50% of it’s power needs from wind. On a yearly basis it’s 21% now and increasing. Nukes are 10%, solar a few percent. In 2020, it was 4%. As more and more windfarms and solar is installed in TX, more and more will come from renewables or non carbon sources. With reserves.
Now, how much more would rates have to increase to have this super conducting grid interconnect in plane and have ‘spare capacity’ to wheel across the country in emergencies?
Eastern grid is OK… rate payers there would rather build more lines to Canada for cheap hydro. Build off shore wind farms.
Western grid is OK…other than CA that’s already sucking lots of power from WA and OR. No one in WA or OR is going to get excited about a ‘grid tie’. During the day, CA generates a lot of solar and increasing fast. It disappears at night and when it rains in rainy season.
So where is the business case?
t.