Comment by FireBeyond
3 hours ago
That might be so, but is also simplifying things a little too much and pointing to the issue.
"It's a poorly designed grid". PJM might serve 65M+ users, but 2GW isn't easily able to be shipped across their grid. Dominion is proposing a 180mi 525kV HVDC line (ironically enough, from southern VA to northern VA) that can handle up to 3GW. But that's a $5 billion project. That number goes up. A PJM project proposal to ship power from NJ to VA is in the order of $12B.
So yeah, the grid can handle it, but now you're foisting twenty billion dollars of costs on to your users for the benefits of 37 customers. That's a ... pretty raw ... deal for the rest of them.
(And yes, PJM already has a grid that can supply some of those needs, and the reality isn't proposing that they run a new HVDC line just for these projects, but the capacity has to come from somewhere).
Agreed, this is a difficult topic to simplify. "The grid can handle it" is almost always a * statement.
Can it handle it today? What about next year with the approved interconnects? What about in 2030? Does "handle it" include summer load or just average, what if temps are 5 degrees hotter than power models ran? What if PJM can't solve it's high priority overloads this year?
People want to talk about the grid as a binary system vs what it really is.
If serving those 37 customers forces choices that increase risk or cost for real customers (citizens, critical infrastructure like hospitals), it's a bad deal.
It seems like power utilities are optimized to solve problems, and serving these 37 customers can be framed as a solvable problem more easily than "Keeping the grid affordable and reliable" can.