After the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) finalized a 1,363-page transmission rule to accelerate the green-energy buildout last week, developers of renewable energy are more ready than ever to participate in the multi-decade, climate-focused initiative. In 2021, Princeton researchers estimated the U.S. grid buildout necessary to create tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines will cost $3.5 trillion by 2050. In the meantime, mining officials and executives from the U.S. and Europe are even now meeting in Paris to discuss how to increase the supply of critical minerals for the green energy transition, heartily supported by the current administration.
The demand, driven by ambitious climate-change-abatement agendas and clear indications of demand from the high-tech and EV/battery-storage sectors, is clearly there, and with a shift in demand of even 10-15%, one can see a shift in price of 100% or more. With the green transition, many of the components necessary for electricity generation become power fuels – chromium, copper, aluminum, fiberglass, graphite, lithium – and the extraction and processing of these materials need to be priced into green energy prices.
To minimize upfront costs, it makes sense to put technologies that integrate renewables in places where the geography matches the essence of the capacity: you put up solar where it's sunny, and wind power where it's windy. With radical innovation in transmission technologies, this can become less important, as it would bring the ability to transport energy from where it’s produced to where it’s needed (i.e. where most people actually live) more efficiently, but that innovation has yet to arrive.
The Grid
America’s energy grid is anything but monolithic. Built in fits and starts over more than a century, using myriad technologies, standards, and materials, it’s a wildly eclectic collection of infrastructure, divided roughly into three parts: what’s west of the Rockies, east of them – and then Texas. (More on that later.)
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