Report: ‘Grid-Enhancing Technologies’ Could Save $5B per Year by Boosting US Renewables Capacity

The U.S. could double its capacity for new wind and solar power, save billions of dollars and cut millions of tons of carbon-dioxide emissions from its generation fleets if federal incentives can be aligned to deploy a suite of technologies to unlock the full capacity of transmission grids.  

So says a new report from The Brattle Group, modeling the benefits of a set of "grid-enhancing technologies" across the wind-power-rich grids of Kansas and Oklahoma. According to its analysis, spending about $90 million to implement these technologies could yield a payback in less than a year, with annual power cost savings of about $175 million delivering ongoing benefits for years to come. 

That’s because the technologies in question can drastically increase the renewable energy capacity of the grid operated by Southwest Power Pool. The report highlights tools such as dynamic line rating systems to discover the actual rather than presumed carrying capacity of transmission lines, combined with advanced power flow controls and "topology optimization" to analyze and route electricity across the least-congested lines in the network.