Rough calculations suggest that, on current trends, adding 12 hours of storage to the entire US grid would cost around $500 billion and pay for itself within a few years. By contrast, upgrading the US transmission grid could cost $7 trillion over 20 years.
Counterintuitively, electricity cables under the North Atlantic might be much more economical. It would not have the eminent domain and construction complexities of upgrading the US continental land grid. If this cost estimate is accurate, it may be much cheaper.
Is it really much more secure though? Wouldn’t one well-placed underwater bomb knock it out of action for weeks or months?
If security was your top priority, surely decentralized microgrids with widely dispersed battery grid storage would be much more effective?
I’m very skeptical of the actual benefit of something like this.
The 6GW system would be made up of pairs of cables stretching about 3,500km across the North Atlantic.
I don’t see much benefit unless this becomes cheaper than the cost of building and running the equivalent generation (about two large plants.) Ohio’s data center load alone is projected to increase by about 4.5 GW by 2030.
If security was your top priority, surely decentralized microgrids with widely dispersed battery grid storage would be much more effective?
I’d say so, and it seemed like that was the way the industry was trending about 10 years ago but it seems like the large data center demand stalled that considering some of the facilities could use their own generation plant. Plus, the United States already has a precedent of substations being taken down by gun toting idiots.
There’s a similar project that would supply power from Australia-Asia that spans 4,600 km when completed. But such big projects could easily be caught up in various delays, and it’s a problem if a country is too dependent on a single power link. Self-reliant renewable energy production definitely seems more secure.
