White House, States Work to Supercharge Existing Grid With Tech

The White House’s latest bid to squeeze more performance out of the existing power grid comes in recognition of the need to move faster, a senior Biden administration official said on Tuesday.

“As we think about the timescales, we actually need stuff that can cook right now, right away—very, very quickly,” Ali Zaidi, President Joe Biden’s national climate adviser, said at a White House panel discussion on Tuesday. “And the way to do that is by deploying grid-enhancing technologies; by reconductoring the lines that we have already strung up or buried across the country.”

The White House and 21 mostly blue states unveiled on Tuesday an agreement to focus more on deploying grid-enhancing technologies. Those technologies include specialized software and hardware that can “get more juice out of our existing grid,” said Ric O’Connell, executive director of the think tank GridLab.

Grid-enhancing technologies have been proven around the world, but widespread deployment in the US has lagged, according to the White House.

One type of technology, advanced conductors, can double transmission capacity and offer the lowest-cost approach to meeting more than 80% of the nation’s transmission needs by 2035, said Amol Phadke, an energy and environmental policy scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, speaking at the same panel.

Zaidi acknowledged that new capacity must also be built, and promised that the administration will “get more inventive about that, whether it’s permitting, whether it’s the regulatory risk, whether it’s the market risk.”

Last month alone the White House kick-started a bid to upgrade 100,000 miles of transmission lines over the next five years.

The 21 participating states—which represent slightly more than half the nation’s population—are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin.