Meanwhile we’re living through the hottest years in recorded history and suffering from extreme weather impacts, both caused by the fossil fuels worsening climate change.
Thousands of gigawatts worth of new clean energy projects have been proposed to meet this demand, but they are stuck waiting to connect to the grid, unable to come online without expensive, and time-consuming transmission system upgrades. Without that new clean energy generation, utilities often choose to keep dirty coal plants online or propose new gas plants to meet expected demand, worsening air pollution and accelerating climate change.
The United States must expand and strengthen our grid, but we’re only expanding our transmission capacity at a rate of less than 1% per year, far below the 4-7% expansion grid expertssay we need. New transmission lines can take up to 10 years to come online, and long-distance power lines can take even longer.
This technology could save consumers $85 billion, quadrupling current rates of transmission capacity expansion, and hit 90 percent clean energy, all by 2035.