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.
Nobody has proven that those 37 customers are to blame compared to the poorly structured forward pricing system which is largely to blame for some of their recent pricing increases. Not sure where this grid can handle it narrative is coming from. Most of the woes in this article are cherry picked.
Who said it was a poorly designed grid? I think you missed what I said. Their forward price auction system misaligns prices 3 year in advance. My point is a lot of the price increases for PJM is due to this auction system.