Rethinking electricity grids.

Here’s a little statistic that I predict will  get the fingers of avid YouTube commentors twitching right from the get-go. According  to a report called the Kelley Blue Book, in twenty-twenty-three the United  States added a record one-point-two million new electric cars to American roads. BUT instead of putting extra strain on the country’s electrical grids, total US electricity  consumption actually went DOWN last year not up! Why? Well, because devices and appliances  continue to get more and

more efficient as technology improves. In fact, according to the  US Energy Information Administration or IEA, overall US electricity consumption has barely  changed at all for the last twenty years, largely due to better building codes,  the nationwide roll out of low energy alternatives like LED light bulbs, and  the widespread adoption of heat pumps. Just as well really, because the three  main US grid networks are old and have been creaking at the seams for a long time.  But America, just l

ike the rest of the world, WILL need additional electrical capacity at some  point, and adding that capacity to those ageing networks is a full-on modern-day nightmare of  land appropriation, rights of way negotiations and permitting bureaucracy that can take years and  years and cost millions of dollars to get through. So, if there was some way to eliminate  those hurdles and save a good chunk of that cost then surely, we’d  be onto to a winner, right? Well, there is a way. And it’s been starin

g us in  the face all along. It’s called ‘reconductoring’ Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think, Just like most developed nations, the  United States is covered with a vast network of pylons supporting big thick  cables taking the electrons from where they’re generated to where they’re needed. The  pylons often run across privately owned land, and in most areas the idea of adding more of them  is greeted with very strong local opposition, and requires extensive environmental  assessments, all o

f which can mean that permitting and construction can take ten years or  more to complete – time we don’t really have if we want to get all that additional renewable energy  capacity factored in before the end of the decade. But here’s the thing. There’s nothing really  wrong with the EXISTING pylons. It’s the wires that are strung between them that are the  problem. They’re typically quite antiquated and made of a relatively inefficient mix of  materials that were perfectly adequate back in the

days when wasting electricity really  didn’t matter because coal was dirt cheap, the atmosphere was an invisible open sewer for  greenhouse gas emissions and most homes were only running a tiny television, a twin tub washing  machine and a single light bulb in each room. So, while clever engineers at the consumer  end have been using modern technological advances to vastly improve the efficiency of  the myriad everyday devices that you and I now take for granted, other similarly clever  boffins

at the distribution end have been developing materials that will allow them to  send far more electrons through their cables. A recent online webinar hosted by CTC  Global explained in some detail how these new conductors differ from existing  technology and what sort of impact they can have on project costs and timelines. The  webinar itself is an hour and a half long, but the salient points are worth summarising here.  And by the way I’ve left a link in the description to the full presentatio

n if you want to get the  information straight from the horse’s mouth. Anyway, here’s the potted version. The wires  used for the last hundred years or so consist of an aluminium conductor with steel wire  armour protection. More correctly known as Aluminium Conductor Steel Reinforced, or ACSR.  In the seventies that technology was improved a little bit with something called Aluminium  Conductor Composite Reinforced, or cable, which provided more capacity and less sag on the  cables themselves.

Sagging is not a small problem by the way, as those of us of a certain age know  only too well. On an electrical grid it’s more than just an unsightly irritation though, it can  be a very dangerous hazard. In extreme cases lines can come close enough to adjacent tree canopies  that they can cause a significant fire hazard. They can also interfere with each other. In 2003  there was a major blackout on the East coast of America, predominantly as a result of excessive  conductor sag that tripped o

ut the entire North East grid. That event arguably accelerated the  development of composite materials to further increase strength and reduce the weight of  those long cable runs between pylons. That led initially to Aluminium Conductor Fibreglass  Reinforced, or ACFR cables being introduced, and then to Aluminium Encased Composite Core, or  AECC cables, using carbon fibre in the conductor. The latest iteration of the technology  is Aluminium Conductor Composite Core or ‘A triple C’ cable, usin

g a carbon and glass  fibre composite core encased in aluminium. The composite core provides superior strength and  the lighter weight of the carbon fibre allows for about thirty percent more conductive aluminium  to be added. That not only provides much more capacity – up to twice as much in fact - along the  same cable run, but it also lowers the electrical resistance, reducing the dreaded line losses and  making the cable much more efficient. These modern cables can operate at higher temperat

ures with  much less sag, as this chart shows. The red line at the bottom represents the old ACSR wires  and the blue line right at the top represents the modern A triple C technology. You can see  that after about a hundred degrees Celsius, ACSR and all the other older versions start  to droop quite alarmingly, reaching more than seventy inches or about one-point eight metres at  the higher end of the temperature scale. So, it’s pretty clear from this that ‘A triple C’ wires are  an ideal candi

date for reconductoring projects. The benefits don’t stop there though.  Reconductoring existing supply routes costs about half as much as a full upgrade  rebuild. It’s also a much faster process too because it quite neatly circumnavigates one of  the most time-consuming aspects of any energy infrastructure project, which is the permitting  process. Because reconductoring comes under the category of ‘maintenance’ and not ‘new build’,  there’s no requirement to get new permits for the work. That

means what can potentially be  a decade-long process can be reduced to just eighteen months to two years. That’s a big win  for grid operators. This recent study from the folks at Berkeley Lab found that there were no  fewer than ten thousand supply projects waiting for grid connection permissions at the end of  twenty-twenty-two, ninety-five percent of which were from zero-carbon sources. That’s  enough to double the capacity of the United States Electricity grid- if they  could just get themse

lves connected. So, the ability to restring existing networks in the  meantime while we’re waiting for new projects to cut through the red tape will be a crucial part  of the race towards decarbonisation of energy. Reconductoring has several other UPSTREAM benefits  too. According to the numbers presented during the CTC webinar, reduced line losses and improved  efficiency achieved by the reconductoring that CTC has ALREADY INSTALLED in over eleven  hundred projects in more than sixty-five count

ries around the world are now saving more  than ten MILLION megawatt hours of energy every year – enough to run almost a million US homes  or charge nearly two and a half million electric cars. They’re also saving about a hundred billion  gallons of water used at thermal power plants, because those power plants now produce much less  of the useless energy that used to just get lost along the journey to the customers property. And  perhaps most importantly of all, those efficient new wires are re

ducing CO2 emissions by more than  four million metric tonnes. Every year. That’s like taking nearly a million internal combustion  engine cars off the road. And as a final bonus, taking steel out of the wires and replacing  it with carbon fibre composites helps to resist a phenomenon known as cyclic load  fatigue and it massively reduces corrosion, especially in agricultural and coastal areas. In  simple of terms, that means the wires last much longer in operation – which is another thumbs up 

from Jeremy and Colin in the finance department. Reconductoring can’t solve all the  infrastructure challenges involved int the green energy transition of  course. New capacity will still need to be built out as the prodigious consumption  requirements of a globally expanding population exceed even the remarkable efficiency  improvements we’ve talked about today. And as utility grids include an  ever-increasing amount of renewables like wind and solar onto their systems, a  lot of that generatio

n will be located in areas that are not conveniently close to  the towns and cities that will house more than seventy percent of the human population  by twenty-fifty. America is a actually quite a good example. These two maps from the  US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL show where the wind blows the most and  sun shines the strongest across the country. And this third map shows where the most densely  populated areas are. Not a great match, is it? Similar logistical issues exist i

n many  countries around the world. Here in the UK for example, we have vast offshore wind  farms around our coastlines. Over in Germany, the majority of wind is generated in the north  but mostly needed in the south, and of course the logistics get even more difficult in  regions like Africa, Asia and Australia where transmission distances can be enormous. The advent of these new super materials will not only make those new supply lines much more  efficient, but if countries can effectively dou

ble the capacity of EXISTING networks at a  fraction of the cost, and in a quarter of the time it takes to complete new build projects,  then it provides an extremely important buffer zone while nations sort out the bureaucratic  complexities of their existing regulatory systems, and may just make the difference between  hitting our net zero targets or missing them. If you’ve worked with this technology  yourself, or if you’ve just got news and views on electrical grid systems or  the energy tra

nsition more generally, then why not jump down to the comments  section below and leave your thoughts there. That’s it for this week though. A massive thank you to our Patreon supporters,  without whom this channel quite simply would not exist. And an extra special thank-you to  the folks whose names are scrolling up the screen beside me here, all of whom celebrate  an anniversary of Patreon support in March. If you fancy getting exclusive  early access to all my videos AND having YOUR say on th

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See you next week.