Getting through the rights of way and permitting stage for transmission easily takes a decade for a significant route, sometimes it can take two decades. The US government does not seem to want to change this, based on the defeat of two bills in the congress, and the Administration does not seem to care.
If we can’t get new routes, then what is there to do? Well, it is expensive, disruptive to the stability of the grid, and some consider it foolish, but the answer is upgrade the current corridors, not just a bit (e.g., 138kV to 230kV) but by a lot. The highest AC voltage in common use in the US is 765 kV. There are over 2,500 miles of 765kV in the transmission network of 240,000 miles of physical corridor today, it is a proven technology.
How about we prioritize 50,000 miles of existing transmission for upgrading to 765 kV? Cost would be about $200-350 billion. About half the cost of chasing new rights of way.
In many cases the rights of way are not wide enough, the switchyards and substations too small, and the interconnections to sub-transmission and other transmission require transformer changes.
The difference in costs between rebuilding a line at its current voltage and high voltage for the actual lines is between $1 and 2 million per mile (bringing total costs to $4-6 million). Substation costs at each junction can easily reach $40 million dollars or more. Â Installing temporary mobile multi-voltage substations while upgrading makes sense. Â The good news is as each link is upgraded, the multi-voltage substations may be able to be moved to the next location in the system, and simpler, single high side substations can replace them.
138 kV single circuit lines (the most common transmission line in the US) carries between 150 and 200 MVA. While a 765 kV line moves 2000 MVA. This is a factor of 10 improvement.
Instead of waiting 10-25 years for new rights of way for transmission, let’s side step the issue, and upgrade.
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