Running modern societies on clean electricity rather than burning fossil fuels will require improvements to our electric grid. Building new power lines is costly and involves time-consuming processes to acquire new land, rights-of-way, and other permits.
“Reconductoring” – replacing existing steel-cored power lines with advanced conductors with composite cores – can carry twice as much power at a given diameter compared to conventional lines. Reconductoring could provide 80% of the transmission capacity increases needed to achieve 90% clean energy generation by 2035. Upfront costs are higher, but $180 billion in generation and transmission costs would be saved by 2050, compared to building new power lines.
This would result in far fewer cases of eminent domain on private property to build new power lines
Read more from the article at anthropocenmagazine.org
An elegant and affordable solution to expanding the grid
Summary by Susan McSwain
