Long Story Short: David Palchak on Interregional Transmission (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video Long Story Short: David Palchak on Interregional Transmission.

This video features an interview with NREL's David Palchak on the importance of interregional transmission in meeting clean energy targets and the modeling and analysis NREL is conducting to help inform regional and local planning processes.

 

[Music plays, with text on screen: Long Story Short: David Palchak on Interregional Transmission]

[Text on screen: The Short Story]

[David speaks]

Interregional transmission is becoming more important in decarbonized futures because wind and solar is typically far from load, unlike some of the more conventional fossil plants where you're able to build transmission lines from generation to load in a more simplistic manner. But wind and solar is located in places where the wind is good and the solar is good, so that can often be far from load centers.

And so, you have to think about building transmission over longer areas, and sometimes that's going to cross state lines, and it's going to cross other jurisdictions. So being able to access generation or energy from regions outside of your own requires a level of collaboration and coordination that is beyond what typical planning processes go through.

[Text on screen: The Long Story]

Given the importance of transmission and interregional transmission, it's really important that we speed up the timelines of siting and building these transmission lines to meet the federal targets and all of the clean energy targets around the country.

There are a lot of estimates that we would need double the transmission, triple the transmission, and a lot of that depends on the path we go. But certainly, we do need some transmission, and we need neighbors to work together to build it.

At NREL, we're doing modeling and analysis at a national scale to understand the benefits and value of transmission to help regional and local planning processes. So, transmission has a lot of benefits, and it can be hard to quantify those benefits. One of those benefits is certainly that it can provide resilience for the grid, especially in times of extreme events.

Being able to buy power from your neighbor is a way to provide reliable power when it's needed even if generators go out because of a storm.

So, there's some new ideas around transmission planning that involves multi-value planning, and that means that you're trying capture all of the different value streams that transmission can provide to an area, so that's reliability benefits, resilience benefits, and resource adequacy benefits.

Capturing all these benefits can really help justify these lines that are difficult to build and make it clear to consumers that this is a valuable proposition.

[Text on screen: nrel.gov/grid/transmission-integration.html]

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