As countries around the world eye the broad, rapid deployment of renewable energy and invest to make energy systems more resilient in the face of climate change, it has never been more important to understand our energy grids and the best pathways to improving them.
That’s why we’re excited to share our first publicly available tool: the Breakthrough Energy Grid Modeling Project and its accompanying report, “A 2030 United States Macro Grid.”
The model and related report were developed as a response to one of the most significant challenges on the path to carbon reduction and clean energy usage: intermittency. With a regional grid, states have limited options for achieving their 2030 clean energy goals. For example, the East Coast has limited access to the abundant solar power in the Southwest, and states on both coasts are unable to easily utilize wind power generated in the Plains. By unlocking the geographical diversity of renewable energy across the United States, we can maximize the benefit of our abundant clean energy resources.
The report shows that by making targeted upgrades to better connect regional electrical grids and upgrading transmission capacity within those grids, states with ambitious 2030 clean energy goals will have an easier path to achieving them and states without 2030 goals will begin to use more clean energy by default. A Macro Grid would also prevent electrical crises like what happened in Texas this year because it would give states access to more diverse energy sources, an important change as the United States experiences more climate-related weather events.
Demand for electricity keeps increasing, as does American generation capacity – we need to ensure that our investments in transmission infrastructure keep pace.