Modern grids allow for more local energy markets they make it more feasible, say, to lower the cost of electricity to people who have a wind farm nearby, or whose land is needed for transmission lines. That would make timid politicians more comfortable with legislation designed to streamline things it would hasten the arrival of essential new capacity and, by reducing uncertainty, it would lower the cost of capital. If those plans are to work, and to do so legitimately, there also needs to be less objection to building in the first place. Reforms to planning rules must make it easier to build big and often unpopular bits of infrastructure. Too many that need connections are delayed by red tape, as are vital new transmission lines. In addition to investment in new projects, existing ones must be speeded up. For comparison, the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental think-tank, reckons that worldwide spending on electric grids is currently around $260bn a year: far less than is needed and, tellingly, less than is invested in upstream oil and gas. The 45% that goes on grids and storage comes to about $1.1trn a year between now and the middle of the century. A recent report by the Energy Transitions Commission, a global group of experts, sees the split in costs between the new generating capacity needed for an ample supply of clean electricity and the distribution, transmission and storage systems needed to make that supply useful as a roughly 55:45 proposition. And, in a deep and damaging irony, some of the biggest advocates of slowing climate change do not accept the logic that to do so requires building more.Īs our Technology Quarterly explains, expanding and greening the grid will be demanding-and phenomenally expensive. The trouble is that the scale of the changes needed to adapt the world’s electricity grids is vastly underappreciated.
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