Department of Energy announces $1.5 billion in electric grid improvements
Department of Energy announces $1.5 billion in electric grid improvements
www.upi.com
Department of Energy announces $1.5 billion in electric grid improvements - UPI.com
28 comments
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The projects will enable nearly 1,000 miles of new electric transmission development and 7,100 megawatts of new capacity in Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
So it's a bailout
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the fact that texas' jank ass disconnected grid is getting a dime of federal money is frustrating. they want their own grid, they can have it. if they want federal dollars to fix what they broke then they should be forced to connect and follow the same rules as everyone else.
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Not a swing state in that list. Don’t they know you only help those that get you elected??
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It doesn’t really seem like a bailout.
The packaging says reliability, but the description within the article looks less like neighborhood reliability, and more like national grid reliability.
Specifically, those grid interconnections - the Cimarron Link, Southern Spirit, and Southline. Cimarron will connect Texas to massive wind farms in Oklahoma - power that isn’t going anywhere. It’ll connect Texas to Mississippi (Southern Spirit), and Texas to Tucson. I don’t know about the Mississippi connection, but Tucson is connected to Hoover Dam, which means that losses from transmission be damned, once this is all done, power from (at least) Oklahoma can be sent to LA the next time Lake Meade dries up, with the possibility of power from the east coast finding its way to the west, and vice versa.
As other commenters pointed out, Texas already has some of the least expensive energy in the country, so adding capacity doesn’t make a lot of sense. And transmission lines only adds reliability in the sense that there’s more supply, but most of their failures are not supply related. My understanding of the adding capacity part is just a dovetail into adding solar capacity to states with a lot of land that will become increasingly useless for farming as the climate changes. It just so happens that Biden is trying to create a U.S.-based solar panel and battery production industry. Not a bad strategy to throw cash into generating/subsidizing demand at the same time as we start adding tariffs to imports of those products. (It’s not like, a great strategy, either - because unless the U.S. is willing to subsidize their market longer than China is willing to subsidize theirs, then the U.S. will not really ever have a competitive industry, but I guess if they view it as a matter of national security, then it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense.)
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It's infrastructure week!
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$1.5 billion won't actually get you a whole lot.
Better than nothing though. Considering utilities can do this as cap projects, I feel like this money is better spent on bridges/roads.
Who is going to own the infrastructure when it is complete? Outside of like three main utilities, there are no state owned utilities. (Tennessee, Bonneville, and LCRA, I believe).
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There's several municipally owned ones too. Like Silicon Valley Power.
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How about we stop handing out tax money to private corporations.
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not for the nimrods in texas though...EDIT: holy shit, i stand corrected
28 comments
Wow actual infrastructure spending? Awesome!
And it isn't even infrastructure week!
It is now!!!
Did you sleep through the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill?
Yes? Am I not allowed to be excited about this?