From our bird's-eye view of the renewable energy industry, we often see positive developments for humanity before they become common knowledge. The purpose of this blog is to highlight the clean energy innovations and sustainability actions that are legitimate cause for optimism despite the very real threats to people and the environment posed by climate damage.
written by ReVision Co-Founder Phil Coupe
Surging electricity demand from massive computer data centers (necessary for cloud computing, artificial intelligence, social media, and storage of photos and videos) and fleets of heat pumps and electric vehicles, is revealing a major obstacle to the clean energy transition – grid capacity. Extreme heat events are also straining our increasingly overburdened grid, enhancing the risk of utility outages as air conditioning units are cranked up to cool buildings and homes.
While it’s still possible to connect residential and small-scale commercial solar arrays to today’s utility grid, developers of larger-scale wind, solar, and battery storage projects across the country are increasingly stuck in so-called “interconnection” logjams because our outdated grid infrastructure badly needs an upgrade. In 2023, the waiting list of pending energy generation projects was unprecedented and continues to get longer:
It is estimated that New England, and the rest of America, needs a utility grid with 2 to 3 times more transmission capacity than what we have today to enable the transition away from fossil fuels while simultaneously meeting society’s increasing electricity demand. This is an enormous bottleneck to the clean energy transition because permitting and building new high-voltage transmission lines has become as difficult as siting new nuclear power plants—recall that two major grid expansion projects proposed in NH and ME were killed by local opposition in the past few years.
But a Massachusetts startup might have a game-changing technology solution in the form of superconducting transmission lines that can be installed directly onto existing transmission infrastructure. “Superconductivity” describes the ability of certain materials to conduct direct current (DC) electricity without energy loss when they are cooled below a critical temperature.
Tim Heidel, an MIT PhD graduate, has started a new company, VEIR, in Woburn, MA (right near one of our ReVision branches) that is attempting to commercialize a super-cooled liquid nitrogen technology that enables the transmission of vast amounts of power within the same infrastructure that comprises traditional high-voltage transmission lines.
According to Heidel, “we can deploy much higher power levels at much lower voltage, and so we can deploy the same high power but with a footprint and visual impact that is far less intrusive, and therefore can overcome a lot of the public opposition as well as siting and permitting barriers,” Heidel says, in an interview with MIT News. VEIR’s solution comes at a time when more than 10,000 renewable energy projects at various stages of development are seeking permission to connect to U.S. grids.
According to engineers at the large utility company National Grid, which is exploring a partnership with the startup, VEIR’s technology has the potential to increase transmission by 5 to 10 times what is now carried by traditional transmission lines.
In December 2022, VEIR completed a low voltage, single phase demonstration of a 100-foot overhead DC superconducting power line. VEIR successfully operated the line at 4,000 Amperes — a first for an overhead superconducting powerline. In April 2023, VEIR energized a low-voltage, low-power overhead outdoor demonstration, pictured at right.
VEIR enables the deployment of superconducting power lines that are scalable from short to long-distance overhead, on-ground, and underground applications, including subsea transmission. Previous generations of superconducting power lines use complex, closed loop, active nitrogen cooling systems that limit their use to short-distance underground applications. According to the company’s website, VEIR uses a simple, open loop, passive nitrogen cooling system where distributed evaporation delivers 20x the cooling power per kilogram of liquid nitrogen coolant. VEIR decreases the complexity, reduces conductor weight, and lowers the overall cost of superconducting power lines, and offers more capacity than any other advanced conductor.
According to the Rocky Mountain Institute, electricity is now the largest form of ‘useful energy’ on the planet, illustrated in the graph below. We think it’s rational cause for optimism that solar electricity is now the cheapest form of power ever known to humankind, and that 100% of global energy demand can eventually be met with renewable energy combined with energy storage and efficient electric appliances like heat pumps and electric vehicles. Companies like VEIR indicate that we will eventually be able innovate our way to the just, equitable and low-carbon electric future we know is possible for ourselves and generations to come.
