IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - November/December 2021 - 70

Policies that drive clean electricity procurement increase
pressure on institutions that set the rules for transmission,
wholesale energy markets, siting, and permitting.
Project study finds that reaching the net-zero economy-wide
emissions sector by 2050 will require solar and wind deployment
occupying between 1 and 3% of land usable for solar and
18 to 57% of land suitable for wind development, depending
on the land constraints assumed.
Progress is being made regionally, through the federal
west-wide energy corridors planning process and solar
energy zones, wind energy zones off the Atlantic coast, and
the Texas competitive renewable energy zones development
in the early 2010s. Developing accurate data and holding
early, consistent stakeholder engagements are crucial to
the success of these initiatives. A federal Grid Deployment
Authority, proposed in a June 2021 congressional infrastructure
bill, would be aimed in part at addressing and
reducing barriers to permitting and siting transmission
and renewable energy projects.
Finally, UC Berkeley's " 2035 Report " indicates that an
ambitious federal clean electricity standard will likely lead
to rapid retirements of coal resources. This, in turn, creates a
significant potential for rate shocks due to the need to account
for unpaid balances on large fossil assets, which RMI estimates
are greater than US$100 billion for coal plants alone
as of 2019. At the same time, rapid system transformation is
likely to displace tens of thousands of workers in the fossil
fuel industry and hollow out the tax base of many communities
in which fossil infrastructure is located. Governments
can play a role in mitigating these impacts, such as providing
low-cost financing to deal with stranded fossil assets as well
as promoting reinvestment and continued social services in
fossil-dependent communities.
Ensuring that a core set of policies is in place improves
the chances of rapidly decarbonizing the electricity sector
at a reasonable cost. Policies that drive clean electricity procurement
increase pressure on institutions that set the rules
for transmission, wholesale energy markets, siting, and permitting.
They also create real social equity concerns. Policy
makers have tools, supported by experience, to address and
balance these concerns as they consider setting the pace for
grid decarbonization.
The Role of Transmission to Enable
Power Sector Decarbonization
Much of the high-quality renewable resources in the United
States are in regions where the power grid is weak or lacks
sufficient transmission capacity to move this energy to load
centers. Policies that control how stakeholders plan, pay for,
and permit transmission can help or hurt investment in mod70
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power & energy magazine
ernizing our power grid. Two recent studies, one from the
Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG) and the other
from the Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA),
with modeling and analysis support from Vibrant Clean
Energy, show that removing barriers to transmission development
may be able to realize US$8 trillion to US$10 trillion
in investment in rural America and save consumers between
US$100 billion and US$500 billion.
These studies were done with capacity expansion and
production cost models. The assumptions embedded in these
studies are from the NREL Annual Technology Baseline (referenced
previously). They examined different scenarios of
renewable energy deployment, distributed energy resources
(DERs), and carbon dioxide emission reduction targets over
the eastern interconnection (refer to the ACEG study) and the
whole contiguous United States (refer to the CCSA study).
The modeled scenarios included algorithms to minimize the
cost of the system under the various pathways.
The analyses of both studies showed that transmission
investment was necessary for the United States to reach its
decarbonization targets while providing the following additional
benefits:
✔ cost-effectively reduce electric sector carbon dioxide
emissions by 65% by 2035 and by more than 95% by
2050 and reduce other air pollutants across the region
✔ decrease the average electric bill rate by more than a third,
from more than 10¢/kWh today to around 7¢/kWh (based
on $2018) by 2050, saving a typical household more than
$300 per year. The cost of transmission accounted for
only 3-5% of total electricity costs on average
✔ create between 6 and 8 million net new jobs
✔ deliver reliable power by meeting electricity demand in
every 5-min period, even with wind and solar providing
more than 80% of the annual electricity in 2050.
The studies also found that scenarios with greater emission
reductions were more cost-effective and created more
jobs than those that achieved fewer emission reductions.
These studies showed that transmission was a key enabler of
increased jobs and cost reductions. Figure 2 shows the buildout
of U.S. transmission from the ACEG and CCSA studies.
The strong carbon and clean electricity (CE) scenarios set a
target for reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 95% by 2050,
while the weak carbon scenario reduces carbon by 70%. The
business-as-usual (BAU) case in the figure does not consider
carbon constraints. The additional transmission in the ACEG
study compared with the CCSA one is due to higher utilityscale
wind and solar as well as expanded regional transmission
november/december 2021
IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - November/December 2021

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