America’s Electrical Grid Is an Incredible Feat of Engineering—And Its Biggest Bottleneck

Three straight weeks of 110-degree temperatures in Phoenix. Deep freeze in Texas. A sweltering heat wave across nearly a third of the country. America’s power grid is under unprecedented strain from extreme weather caused by climate change—and it desperately needs modernizing. 

But it’s not so simple. The electric grid is a mosaic of incredible feats of engineering—an elaborate web weaving together power from nuclear reactors, massive hydroelectric dams, and even solar farms into a network capable of powering our homes and charging our cars instantly and reliably.

And it’s easy to take for granted. When we first discovered how to use electricity, it was an open question as to how replenishing electric power should happen. One option, about which I previously wrote, involved the use of battery men who would deliver weekly supplies of electric power like milkmen once did with milk. There were even visions of giant acid battery tanks buried beneath homes that could be replenished like septic tanks. 

Instead, the system that eventually won out was Thomas Edison’s. The most efficient system was one that could generate electric power as needed and transmit it instantly—no delivery men required. 

It would take decades to be built out fully, but as it grew to encompass more and more of the  North American continent, the model of distributing electric power from plant to home transformed society and our economy. Yet for all the transformations the electric grid wrought, it is now time for the grid itself to transform if it is going to keep pace with the rapidly changing nature of power generation and electricity usage. 

Such transformation, however, poses an unprecedented challenge. The flip side of the grid’s impressive complexity is the difficulty of altering any part of it. And although the electric grid is the very system powering the U.S. economy, it is also becoming the country’s greatest bottleneck in increasing the abundance of energy.

Let’s explore the current state of the electrical grid, how it works, and its history, and its future.

The electrical grid today

There’s not just one grid supplying electric power within the United States—there are four.

Source: SimpleThread

The Eastern, Western, Alaska, and Texas interconnections (i.e., grids)  are collectively composed of over 11,925 power plants, 160,000 miles of high voltage lines, and many millions of miles of distribution lines that reach like tiny tendrils into even the most rural parts of the country. 

Taken together, North America’s power plants have the ability to generate roughly 1.2 billion kilowatts of power at any given time. If all the plants were to run continuously for all 8,760 hours in a year, America could supply something like 10.5 trillion kilowatt hours of electric power. Although it’s not practical to have all of the plants operating around the clock since that would overload the system, this would be the hypothetical ceiling of America’s grid generation capacity.

Currently, annual consumption of electricity falls around 4 trillion kilowatt hours in the U.S—or roughly equivalent to having all of America’s power plants operating 30% of the time.

However, in the coming years, the consumption of electricity is anticipated to increase greatly, particularly due to the growing number of electric vehicles. 

EVs consume a lot of electricity. An EV’s battery can store the equivalent of an average American household’s daily electric power consumption two or three times over. If EV owners charge to full from 50% each day, a household with an electric vehicle will now be consuming twice as much electricity as it did before. And as states like California have mandated that all vehicles sold in the state after 2035 must be electric, it’s becoming increasingly urgent to ensure that the grid will actually be able to supply the additional power that this will require.

Source: Quartz

There are varied estimates for exactly how much electricity consumption will grow over the next 30 years. In the event of aggressive expansion of electric vehicle use, some estimates put total U.S. energy consumption 90% higher than current levels by 2050. More conservative accounts place that figure somewhere between 15%-35%.

Confronting a possible 90% increase in electricity usage would require a large build-out of additional generating capacity, especially if we don’t want to overload the grid. Many will be surprised to learn, however, that there are already over two terawatts of proposed new power generation waiting to come online in interconnection queues. This delay is the result of proposed power generators needing to hear back from regulators and other stakeholders about how and when their generators could be connected to the grid, how much it would cost, and who would be able to pay.

So the only thing standing in the way of the United States producing three times as much power in the next couple of years is not the scarcity of renewable power generation, but rather the regulatory and logistical bottleneck of connecting this new power to the grid.

Source: Electricity, Markets and Policy. Berkeley

The increased demand for green power generation is also reflected in the queue of proposed projects. The vast majority of them are solar or wind plants. In fact, there’s more solar and wind generation in the queue than the total current supply of power coming from natural gas and coal. To be clear, many of the proposed projects in the queue are just that—proposed. Only a portion of them are expected to be built. For others, the cost and time required to hook them up to the grid will render many of the projects uneconomical. 

But it’s not just green energy incentives contributing to a growing queue of proposed projects—it’s also growing wait times in the interconnection queue. As it stands, it can take five years to hear back from grid operators. In states like California, it often takes many more.

To be fair, solving the interconnection challenges for many of these proposed projects is a difficult challenge, requiring new designs to be drawn up and different scenarios to be investigated. Still, the growing queue and daunting wait times indicate that it’s not just building green energy generation that’s the problem—it’s connecting it to the existing grid. 

Before we get into the details of grid interconnection, let’s review how the grid currently operates.