Looking Down the Road
The U.S. power grid will undergo a significant period of investment and redesign over the next few decades. The need for extensive additions to the transmission grid to connect renewables to the power grid is well established. Whether from simple increases in population, or from industry-changing events such as large-scale adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, significant load growth will continue within high-population-density urban areas, requiring extensive additions to the load side of the network as well.
"The greatest challenge to the widespread use of HTS cable systems is actually education and industry awareness," McCall said. "Most utility personnel who are involved in the day-to-day planning and project engineering process are not aware of HTS cable’s unique characteristics or its availability. There is likely at least one project or problem at most utilities where an HTS cable could be considered a viable, if not preferred, solution. Widespread application will not occur until the time that HTS cables become an active part of the set of technologies that a utility considers during its day-to-day problem-solving and planning activities."
HTS cables will likely first be adopted to strengthen urban networks, increasing reliability and enhancing utilities’ ability to supply increased load without building new substations, he predicted. This first use of the new technology may be followed by applications where HTS cables are used to inject large amounts of power from nearby regional transmission grids into load centers. Eliminating grid congestion or line siting issues on these regional networks would be a logical next step. Further out, the Electric Power Research Institute is already studying the development and use of very long inter-regional HTS high-voltage direct current cables capable of transmitting 10 GW over distances of up to 600 miles.
"The industry will continue to make improvements in wire manufacture methods, as well as in the amount of current an individual HTS wire can carry," he said. "Work also continues in developing more cost-effective cryo-cooling systems that are optimized for HTS cable applications. These innovations and developments will continue to roll out as the demand for HTS cables increases and the industry grows."
--Angela Neville, JD is POWER's senior editor.
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