Electric gridlock: Can the growing West’s infrastructure evolve fast enough to keep the lights on? ...Middle East

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One summer afternoon as the temperature pushed toward 100 degrees, a power line sagging in the heat hit a filbert tree in Hillsboro, Oregon, creating a dazzling electric arc and knocking out power 1,260 miles away in Denver.

The Hillsboro line was one of four to fail on Aug. 10, 1996, mostly from hitting trees. One, across the Columbia River from Hillsboro, started a fire, and 190 miles upstream 13 turbines at the McNary Dam tripped offline.

The cascading effects rippled across seven Western states and parts of Canada and Mexico — from Calgary to El Paso, Texas — cutting the power for 7.5 million people for as long as seven hours.

In Los Angeles, the power outage set off fire alarms around the city and knocked out traffic lights, creating instant gridlock. In San Francisco, chefs at the Hayes Street Grill set up barbecues in the alley behind the restaurant.

 The Western electric grid isn’t the only that has collapsed. In 2003, an overgrown tree, a powerline in Ohio and flawed warning software led to a blackout that shut down 265 power plants and left 55 million people in the Northeast — including those in New York City and Toronto — in the dark .

“The grid is a living thing,” said Chris Pink, vice president of operations at the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which provides electricity for rural cooperatives in Colorado and three neighboring states. “It knows no boundaries.”

The electric grid — more than half a million miles of high-voltage transmission lines strung across the nation — is under growing pressure as the economy becomes more electrified and generation shifts from old, fossil fuel-burning plants to renewable resources.

In Colorado, the grid is key to meeting the state’s goal of 100% renewable energy by 2040 and cutting greenhouse gas emissions 100% by 2050. There are already plans to add more than 10,000 megawatts of wind, solar and storage to the state’s grid.

To absorb all that, the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority estimates between $4.5 billion and $8 billion in investments and 3,700 miles of line upgrades are needed.

And the challenge extends beyond the state’s borders. The Western Electricity Coordinating Council, which is responsible for assuring adequate electricity for 14 Western states and two Canadian provinces, warns that the grid is having trouble keeping pace.

A growing population, data centers, cryptocurrency mines, the electrification of manufacturing are all boosting demand. At the same time, the grid is shifting from baseload generation, like coal-fired plants, to variable renewable sources, and severe weather, wildfires and droughts are an increasing threat.

“Data centers can be built in as little as 18 months, and it takes a much longer time than that to get the approval to build new generation or to build out the transmission network,” Kris Raper, a WECC vice president, told The Colorado Sun.

New renewable energy and storage projects are piling up across the West, with waiting times as long as six years to get connected to the grid.

At the end of 2023, Xcel Energy’s Colorado subsidiary had 18 renewable projects in its queue, four that were suspended and 289 that had been withdrawn, according to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study.

While some transmission is being built within state borders, constructing regional lines across the West has been difficult, Raper said, because of “jurisdictional issues.”

“We didn’t get to the place where we are because utilities are delaying resources or not paying attention,” Raper said. “We got there from a confluence of events — weather, people using more electricity, the resources coming on are different than the ones being retired.”

“It is everything everywhere all at one and the grid can only take so much and still be reliable,” she said.

The largest machine in the world

To understand the grid, a bit about electricity and history are in order. An electric generator — a turbine or solar panels — frees electrons to create an electric charge that can be carried on wires.

Thomas Edison put this phenomenon to widespread use with the light bulb. Edison’s generators produced a direct current — with the electrons flowing in one direction. The farther you wanted to send direct current, the higher the voltage needed. It was safe for Edison to send direct current only about a mile.

There were obvious limitations to having a generating station every couple of miles, and George Westinghouse pioneered alternating current, which changes direction every fraction of a second and can be sent over long distances without much energy loss.

One thing about alternating current is that when it is put on the grid it goes where it wants. There are a set of high-voltage transmission lines along Interstate 25 running from Xcel Energy’s Comanche 3 coal-fired power plant in Pueblo to Denver.

There is, however, no guarantee that the electricity from Comanche 3 will end up in Denver, and this complicates managing the grid. The current will flow based on where the demand is, which lines are congested and which have capacity. This can lead to the problem of “loop flow” or unscheduled power flowing through the system.

LEFT: Xcel Energy’s $1.3-billion, 750-megawatt Comanche 3 coal-fired unit in Pueblo is the state’s largest coal-burning power plant. RIGHT: Comprised of nearly 637,000 panels and spanning 1,700 acres in Pueblo County, the The Sun Mountain Solar project went online in February of 2023. (Mike Sweeney, Special to the Colorado Sun)

Tri-State’s Pink said the association’s substation in Gladstone, New Mexico, has technology on its transformer to guard against a loop-flow surge that could be coming from as far away as the Pacific Northwest.

As more renewable energy flows onto the grid, it also creates a new challenge.

Power plants with rotating machines, like a gas turbine, create alternating current, or AC, that can be directly connected to the grid. This spinning creates inertia in the grid, so if there is a disturbance, a drop in power, there are a few fractions of a second to right the system. 

“It is hard to stop a big ship,” Omert Beik, a Colorado School of Mines electrical engineering professor, said.

When renewables are connected to the grid they need to be converted to AC and those resources have no rotating mass, no inertia. “It makes for a lighter system, more vulnerable to perturbations,” Beik said.

There are ways to compensate with battery storage and devices such as a synchronous condenser, which has a spinning motor. This calls for more investment and better grid design.

The nation’s electric grid has been called the largest machine in the world — with 11,000 power plants, 3,000 utilities and 2 million miles of large and small power lines — but it isn’t a single system. It is three pretty much isolated systems.

There is the Eastern Interconnection, which covers 33 Eastern and Midwestern states and Ontario and Quebec, an area from the Atlantic coast to a line running roughly along the eastern New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana borders.

The Western Interconnect covers the 14 Western states, British Columbia and Alberta, and a small piece of Baja, Mexico. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas covers just Texas.

The three grids are barely connected. When Winter Storm Uri caused widespread blackouts in Texas in 2021, the state could not draw extra power from neighboring grids, and when a heat wave taxed the Western grid in 2022, it could not access power from other regions.

“Transfer capability is a critical measure of the ability to address energy deficiencies,” according to the North American Reliability Corp., which is responsible for electric reliability across the entire grid. 

The single biggest gap or “seam” is between the Western and Eastern grids. There are only seven, small direct-current tie lines — scattered from Miles City, Montana, to Artesia, New Mexico — connecting the two grids.

One of the ties, a 20-year-old, 210-megawatt line, runs to Lamar on Colorado’s southeastern plains. Moving electricity from the 1,000-MW transmission lines in Kansas to Colorado would be like driving on Interstate 70 and then at the Kansas-Colorado border having to get on a two-lane state road.

A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden found big operational and economic benefits in more tightly linking the East and the West, particularly the wind resources of the central states and the solar resources of the Southwest.

“Wind on one side and western solar on the other,” Pink said, “you know that looks good, but there is some really expensive transmission that has to be put in place.”

Still, NREL calculated an increase in transfer capacity would produce $2.50 in benefits for every dollar spent on the new transmission facilities.

For now, however, the two grids remain isolated and on the western side of the divide the single most isolated piece of the Western Interconnection is Colorado.

The Colorado grid is not well connected to the rest of the West

“If you think about the Western grid as a highway system, you have a huge interstate highway along the Pacific coast, from Washington to California, moving massive amounts of power back and forth,” said Tyler Farrell, a senior associate with clean energy consultant RMI.

“Similarly, across Montana, Idaho, Arizona, Nevada, huge amounts of transmission have been built,” Farrell said. “Colorado essentially has the equivalent of dirt roads. It’s just not very well connected to the rest of the West.”

Geography hasn’t helped with mountains between Colorado’s population centers and the rest of the region. “Colorado is kind of an island,” said Ken Wilson, a consultant with GridLab, which provides analysis on energy transition issues to regulators, grid operators and utilities. “The Colorado grid is thin.”

In 2021, the state legislature created the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority to identify key transmission projects in the state, bond to finance them and use eminent domain to obtain rights of way if necessary.

Two years later, the legislature directed CETA to do a comprehensive study of the state’s transmission needs. The study concluded that to meet its goals Colorado needs at least $4.5 billion in new and upgraded transmission.

“This is the first statewide study of transmission needs in Colorado,” Maury Galbraith, CETA’s executive director, said. “Colorado utilities routinely plan for their own customers’ needs and their own service territories. So, they’ve been planning for a smaller footprint.”

The electric resource plans developed by each Colorado utility lay out their projected demand for electricity and the new resources to meet it. The current plans project adding more than 10,000 megawatts of new generation and storage in the next 10 years.

The CETA study, however, warned “the state may not be planning sufficient transmission capacity to accommodate the growing load and resource adoption levels.”

To absorb all that, the report concluded, 2,900 miles of existing lines would have to be replaced with ones that can carry more current. This is called reconductoring. Another 269 miles would have to be rebuilt with lines added.

In addition, 548 miles of new transmission must be constructed. Although the seven new lines proposed are the smallest component of CETA’s plan, they are the most expensive, totaling nearly $2 billion.

The San Luis Valley, southeastern and northeastern Colorado are the areas most in need of new transmission, according to the study.

The 2021 legislation also requires utilities with transmission to join a regional, wholesale electric market by 2030. The only two regions in the country without such a market are the Southeast and the West.

“One of the big findings of the study is that we need to address bottlenecks within the state of Colorado in order to facilitate regional market participation,” Galbraith said. “There are a lot of intrastate bottlenecks.”

The study took a brief look at connecting Colorado with the rest of the West, suggesting four transmission lines, with a $753 million price tag, to connect with New Mexico, eastern Wyoming and Utah. Who would build such projects was unanswered.

“CETA as a new entity, without deep pockets, we’re not going to be able to develop all the projects identified in the plan,” Galbraith said. The authority will, he said, identify a small list of possible projects.

“There are utilities in the state that are clearly interested in taking on a significant chunk of the investment that we have identified,” Galbraith said. “We identified an awful lot of upgrades to existing transmission.”

The two utilities building transmission in Colorado are Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electricity provider with 3.7 million customers, and Tri-State, serving 40 rural electric cooperatives and public power districts spread across Nebraska, Wyoming, New Mexico and Colorado.

The biggest project is Xcel Energy’s $1.7 billion Power Pathway — 560 miles of high-voltage transmission lines — an electric highway bringing Eastern Plains wind and solar projects to Front Range cities and suburbs.

“It’s a bit of a field of dreams,” said Steve Martz, Xcel Energy’s vice president for integrated planning. “Colorado has some of the best wind resources in the country. … We knew we needed to kind of build that initial bridge of transmission to that area to start to harvest those resources.”

LEFT: Xcel Power Pathways tower bases sit ready for use in Platteville. RIGHT: Xcel workers contracted from Vivid Engineering Group set and examine concrete base structures for Power Pathways power lines. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)

When the Power Pathway brings electricity to the Denver metro area, the project is projected to be completed by 2028, it will need another $900 million in transmission upgrades and additions in the Denver metro area to handle all that power.

But the $2.6 billion in transmission investments — which was approved by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission — don’t directly connect to any other grid.

“Part of the issue is that a regulated utility has to show the PUC that investments are prudent and address needs in its service area,” said Ron Lehr, a former Colorado PUC commissioner and CETA board member. “Another reason is that if you control the transmission, you control the market.”

The other transmission builder in Colorado is Tri-State, which operates 5,793 miles of high-voltage transmission lines across four states. Its most recent addition is a 230-kilovolt, 112-mile line from Burlington to Lamar capable of carrying 700 MW.

It took five years to build the line across four counties crossing more than 100 parcels of land and requiring more than 700 signatures for access, options to acquire right-of-way, compensation, encroachment and acquisition of right-of-way easements.

The Burlington-Lamar line is part of Tri-State’s $186.5 million Eastern Colorado Transmission Expansion, which includes another 103 miles of transmission lines and a switching station.

“It’s pretty sparse out in eastern Colorado,” Pink said. “The system was designed to serve irrigation with some long radial transmission lines.” The goal of the expansion is to integrate those individual lines into a bigger circuit. “You’re connecting existing parts of the system and making it more robust.”

The projects, however, don’t connect to any other grid.

Twenty years ago, the High Plains Express, a $5.1 billion, transmission project sweeping down from Wyoming through eastern Colorado into New Mexico and Arizona, had been proposed. Tri-State’s projects would have connected to it.

“I wouldn’t say High Plains Express died, but it isn’t active,” Pink said. “Xcel Energy and Tri-State took a look at it and said, ‘What if we only need to do certain things in Colorado? So, let’s just look at Colorado.’”    

There remain drawbacks to this approach, said Vijay Satyal, director of markets and transmission for the environmental group Western Resource Advocates.

“They’re serving their customers, but you are putting a lot more burden on ratepayers only to build up your footprint and not look at opportunities in another utility’s footprint, where the greater interstate connectivity could bring more clean energy sources,” Satyal said.

Demand for electricity is outstripping the grid’s capacity

If Colorado was more firmly tied to the Western Interconnection, it would be joining a grid that is under increasing pressure.

The Western grid — 156,000 miles of transmission lines — is facing a 20% annual growth in electricity demand from now until 2034, reaching 1,134 terawatt-hours, according to WECC. A terawatt-hour is enough electricity to power 70,000 homes for a year.

“We did a Western assessment of resource adequacy in November that basically said, under current circumstances, the pace and magnitude of growth is greater than the resources available to meet that load,” WECC’s Raper said.

Part of meeting that demand will come from new generation and part from being able to move electricity from places with low demand but high output to load centers.

Two regional transmission lines are privately being built across the region. These so-called merchant transmission lines will bring wind power to the West Coast.

The 732-mile, $3 billion TransWest Express will carry power from a central Wyoming wind farm to southern Nevada where it can connect with the West Coast. The wind farm and the transmission line are being built by Phil Anschutz’s Denver-based Power Company of Wyoming.

Although the transmission line cuts across northwestern Colorado, since it is an “express” it makes no stops in the state.

Sun Zia is the second large project, a 550-mile-long transmission line from a central New Mexico wind farm to Pinal County, Arizona, where it can also connect with the West Coast.

The Tohono O’odham and San Carlos Apache tribes, however, have a lawsuit seeking to block Sun Zia, saying it crosses their ancestral homeland.

Both projects employ high-voltage direct current, or HVDC, lines. Thanks to technological improvements, these lines can carry more power, more cheaply than an AC line and since they send that power in one direction it can be better controlled.

“HVDC solves the whole loop-flow problem,” said Debra Lew, director of the Energy System Integration Group, ESIG, a nonprofit focused on grid transformation. “It helps you control where the power is going and avoid causing congestion for your neighbor.”

The TransWest Express and Sun Zia will each be able to carry 3,000 MW of electricity. The HVDC lines have been called “a superhighway with an express lane.” Both lines are taking  more than a decade to build.

There is one other merchant power line in the very early stages of development, the Three Corners Connector, which would link Colorado with the Eastern Interconnection, running about 300 miles to Pueblo from Guymon, Oklahoma.

“We start with the land and talking to landowners,” said Ashley McGeary, a spokesperson for Houston, Texas-based Grid United. It isn’t until landowners are onboard that the company will seek regulatory approvals.

In March, the company held a meeting in Pueblo attended by about 100 people. “This community existed before we got here, it is going to be here after we leave, so the question is how can we help?” McGeary said.

While these merchant lines help bolster the grid, they do little to solve the problem of making Colorado’s grid more resilient and do little to integrate the rest of the region’s grids.

“There has not been a Western Interconnection study encompassing the entire West in about 10 years,” Raper said. “That is too long.”

The West does have some regional planning efforts. “We work a lot with our neighboring utilities, because ultimately, you know, this is one power grid, and so utilities are somewhat reliant on each other,” Xcel Energy’s Martz said.

Xcel Energy is part of the Colorado Coordinating Planning Group, a transmission planning forum, which Martz describes as “a localized, but still regional process.” Tri-State, Colorado Springs Utilities and the Platte River Power Authority are among the group’s nine members.

A broader effort to come up with a transmission plan for the entire West is being done by the Western Transmission Expansion Coalition, known as WestTec. Xcel Energy is a participant as are utilities and regulators from across the West.

The WestTec, however, is voluntary. The hope, Raper said, is that “everyone feels like they got the same opportunity to contribute and create an actionable plan that utilities, merchant developers can use.”

For the moment, ESIG’s Lew said the WestTec plan could help show that an investment in a seemingly distant part of the grid has benefits closer to home, since regional transmission lines always spark local opposition.

When in 2024 the federal government designated a route from Colorado to New Mexico as a “nation interest transmission corridor,” farmers and ranchers were up in arms.

“Colorado and New Mexico, we’re easier pickings,” rancher Ed Hughs told a Prowers County Commission meeting in February. “We’re a rural area and we don’t read the Federal Register.”

On June 5, the Elbert County Planning Commission voted unanimously to recommend the county commissioners deny a permit for Xcel Energy’s Power Pathway to cut through the county. 

This story first appeared in Colorado Sunday, a premium magazine newsletter for members.

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The opposition has been led by the Elbert County Environmental Alliance, which was formed in 2021 with the goal of “minimizing the environmental and economic degradation from Segment 5 of Xcel’s Colorado Power Pathway within Elbert County.”

“We need to educate people,” Lew said. “You want affordability, clean energy, reliability … it’s going to take this much transmission, this much build out. We’ve got to come together as a society to be able to do that.”

In most of the country, grid building is done by regional transmission organizations, RTOs, or independent system operators, ISOs, who run large regional grids, selling wholesale power among utilities, and approving and financing transmission projects.

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, for example, in December approved a $22 billion transmission plan, including a 3,600-mile, high-voltage “backbone” transmission line across its service area covering all or parts of 15 states and the Canadian province of Manitoba.

The West is the largest region in the country without a regional grid operator and wholesale market, but that may be about to change.

Monday: Wholesale power markets come to the West

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