Clean energy executive Cary Kottler was one of millions who lost power and heat as winter storm Uri, as it was called, blasted Texas with a historic cold snap in 2021.
The temperature inside his house hovered just above the freezing mark. Kottler’s family goldfish froze in its tank. He made it through Uri safely, but more than 200 Texans died during the rare cold outbreak, which knocked power out for days.
Now, Kottler’s company, Pattern Energy, is set to build the first major transmission line connecting Texas with the Eastern US electrical grid – something that would have helped get more life-saving electricity into the state during that storm.
“When something like winter storm Uri happens, you could be bringing power from the Southeast, and there’s plenty of power that they could export into Texas,” Kottler told CNN.
That transmission line is just one example of what US officials and energy experts say the US desperately needs more of: towering, high-voltage electrical lines to move large amounts of power from one place to another.
This ability to get electricity from one part of the country to another is ever more important as America’s grid is lashed by increasingly extreme weather. The grid has been hit over and over by powerful storms this year. Taken together, hurricanes Helene and Milton knocked out power for nearly 11 million customers across the Southeast, and thousands are still in the dark.
“You need your electric grid to be bigger than the weather condition,” said former Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Allison Clements. “When you’ve got extreme cold fronts moving across the country, or a heat dome that’s stuck in one area, and you have more power demand than expected, you need to be able to bring in power from places where that weather doesn’t exist.”
‘A VHS grid for a Hulu economy’
With the nation experiencing more extreme weather, US officials and energy experts are urging electrical utilities and lawmakers to dramatically expand the grid to keep electrons flowing.
Extreme weather isn’t the only reason the grid needs to expand. Demand is rising dramatically, driven largely by power-hungry AI and data centers. It would get a colossal amount of clean energy onto the grid, too: There is more electricity from solar and wind waiting to get connected to the grid than the entire amount of energy currently on the grid.
Bottom line, America’s grid is janky and outdated, Clements said.
“We have this interstate transmission system that’s 60, 70-plus years old,” Clements said. “We run a VHS grid for a Hulu economy.”
America’s grid is actually three grids: the Eastern and Western interconnections, plus the independent Texas grid. Within those is a patchwork of about a dozen smaller, regional grid systems. The physical electrical lines connecting all of the systems are fragile and outdated, experts told CNN.
“Between each of those three, we essentially have a soda straw connecting Olympic-sized swimming pools,” said Rob Gramlich, CEO of consulting firm Grid Strategies. “If we could expand those soda straws to wide pipes … everybody could have power.”
The grid of the future needs to be somewhere between double to triple the size of the current grid – and getting regions better connected, Energy Department officials estimate. It also needs to be more resilient to extreme weather in other ways.
“The vast majority of customer outages are caused by distribution, small wire-scale physical damage to the grid, things like tree branch contact with wires, vehicles, high wind, animal contact,” said Ariel Horowitz, deputy director for grid modernization at DOE.
When it comes to wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes and stronger storms, Horowitz said the power industry is showing “a lot of interest” in hardening their electrical infrastructure. The Biden administration is putting $4.2 billion in federal funding toward grid resilience projects, it announced Friday. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm noted there’s been such a flood of project proposals that many will not get funded.
Making the grid more resilient could include replacing the wood electrical poles with stainless steel or concrete, burying power lines or elevating them so they’re out of the way of trees that can topple them. It could also mean making electrical lines more responsive and adaptive, so utilities can switch the lines providing power to customers in the event of a storm.
Clements cautioned that even a bigger grid can’t solve all the challenges posed by climate change-fueled extreme weather. In the case of Hurricane Helene, “you have lots of transformers underwater, total substations underwater,” Clements said. Some of the recently announced federal funding will go to elevating substations in coastal areas above the floodplain, so they won’t be submerged.
But, Clements added, in states like California and Texas – whose grids are withstanding ever-strong extreme heat in the summer, “there’s no example in which investments haven’t made the grid more resilient to extreme weather.”
