Electricity market ignores Trump

Source: CleanTechnica

The electricity grid is inexorably transiting to one powered by renewables.  The grid of the future will be mostly powered by a mix of solar, wind and CSP, with batteries, molten salt and pumped hydro for storage, and with HVDC (high-voltage direct current) power lines connecting places with different climates, so that output of the grid as a whole is stable. 

The cost of all these technologies is falling.  In some locales, renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuels, and they will get cheaper still.  Even though their costs have halved over the last 3 years, batteries are still pricey, but their costs are likely to halve again over the next 3 years.  Ultimately, the grid will have battery storage in its transport fleet (an electric car stores 2-4 days of power demand for a typical home); it will have distributed storage at major substations and places where long-distance power lines meet and diverge; and it will have behind-the-meter storage in homes and businesses with rooftop solar.

Adding long distance HVDC connections to the grid makes a lot of sense.  Power losses are small, and having long-distance connections to other geographies means that even if the wind isn't blowing in your state, you can get power from two states away where it is blowing.  If the sun is shining in your area, and there is too much electricity, HVDC lines can convey it to where the sun isn't shining and there is a shortage. 

Wyoming is part of the US "wind corridor".  It has about the same population as South Australia, which also has excellent wind resources.  Wyoming has huge coal resources.  It also voted overwhelmingly for Trump.  Yet it is rapidly extending its wind generation capacity.  Politicians may make grand gestures (they do that a lot), but in the end wind is expanding despite political grand-standing because it's so cheap. Wind contracts in the wind corridor are being signed at $20/MWh or less.  Even better, Wyoming wind blows strongly in the late afternoon, just when Californian demand is strong.  To take advantage of Wyoming's wind resources, a new HVDC line is to be constructed from Wyoming to the edge of the Southern California grid in southern Nevada.

You can read a detailed account here, but what interested me wasn't so much the details but the principles.  Renewables are cheap and getting cheaper; when push comes to shove, the market shrugs off politics; the percentage of renewables is steadily rising; and the usefulness of wind plus long-distance HVDC lines is being recognised even in a state where Trump won 2/3rds of the vote.