Price Tag in Customer Rates?
Branko Terzic, Sc.D. Engineering (Hon.) is a former Commissioner on the Wisconsin Public Service Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He also was Chairman, President and CEO of a regulated utility and holding company.
R. Bruce Williamson, PhD. is Senior Fellow, Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida. He was Commissioner with the Maine Public Utilities Commission following a career in energy and utility markets and telecommunications in the U.S. and internationally.
This continues our analysis of future electric transmission requirements based on the 2020 Princeton Net Zero (PNZ) report, which findings have found their way into official Department of Energy press announcements related to the 2023 Inflation Reduction Act.
The PNZ research found the net zero target will require that U.S. electricity transmission systems expand "~60% by 2030 and may need to triple...by 2050" to connect wind and solar facilities to demand. In percentage terms, tripling is a two hundred percent increase. The cost estimates for total capital invested in transmission are "$360 billion through 2030 and $2.4 trillion by 2050."
In Part I, we reviewed the history of electric transmission expansion from 1972-2016. In this part, we look ahead at what would be needed to meet the PNZ report projections.
In Part 1 we used Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Form 1 annual reporting data from 1972 to 2016, analyzed at the national level, to establish a historical context for annual growth in U.S. Investor-Owned Utility (IOU) investment in Transmission Plant in Service and annual transmission Operations and Maintenance (O&M) expenses.
In the first part of this article, we also provided a summary of forty years (1972-2016) of Form 1 data on transmission structure miles and determined that transmission structure miles grew at an average rate of between 0.6 percent and 0.7 percent a year during that time period.