Existing and planned transmission lines are insufficient to meet increasing demand for renewable power generation from corporate customers, according to a new report from the Wind Energy Foundation, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.
Even as the price of energy from wind and solar farms falls and large corporations' demand for renewable energy rises sharply, "customers' access to this affordable energy is constrained by inadequate transmission," the report, "Transmission Upgrades & Expansion: Key to Meeting Large Customer Demand for Renewable Energy," concluded.
To meet their renewable energy targets, corporate buyers must encourage state regulators and transmission planners to approve transmission upgrades and expansions and urge the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to improve the planning process for new transmission, especially interregional systems, according to the report.
"It's essential that transmission planners take the growing corporate demand for renewables into account in the planning process," Rob Threlkeld, global manager of renewable energy at General Motors Corp., said in a news release that accompanied the report. "Expanding and upgrading transmission is critical in helping GM access low-cost renewable energy and meet our commitments."
In September 2017, GM agreed to purchase 200 MW from wind farms in Ohio and Illinois to cover all the electricity needs of its manufacturing facilities in Ohio and Indiana. That includes the first, 100-MW phase of Starwood Energy Group Global LLC's planned 250-MW Trishe Wind (Northwest Ohio Wind) project in Van Wert and Paulding counties, Ohio, and 100 MW from Swift Current Energy's planned 200-MW HillTopper Wind Energy Project (Meridien) in Logan County, Ill. Both facilities are expected online in late 2018.
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60 GW by 2025
Other large corporate buyers of renewable energy include Amazon.com Inc., which in October 2017 energized the 253-MW Dermott Wind Farm (Amazon Wind Farm Texas), bringing its cumulative deals for renewable energy in the U.S. to more than 1.2 GW, and Google Inc., whose total renewable energy purchases surpassed 3 GW in 2017 as the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary aims to meet its goal of acquiring enough renewable energy to fully offset the energy consumption of its global operations.
Since 2013, the Wind Energy Foundation report noted, U.S. corporations have signed long-term contracts for nearly 9 GW of solar and wind power, roughly equal to 16 conventional power plants. In May 2016, the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, a coalition of more than 100 large corporations, announced a target of purchasing 60 GW of new renewable generation capacity by 2025.
Providing access to that energy, much of which is produced in the central U.S. far from the major urban centers of the coasts, is proving challenging, though. Independent transmission developers, including Clean Line Energy Partners LLC and TransWest Express, LLC, continue to encounter difficulty winning regulatory approval and landing investors to build their ambitious projects. In December 2017, Clean Line said it would sell the Oklahoma portion of its multistate Plains & Eastern Clean Line to renewable energy developer NextEra Energy Resources LLC, a unit of NextEra Energy Inc. The $2.5 billion project, designed to move up to 4,000 MW of low-cost wind-generated electricity from the Oklahoma panhandle through Arkansas to the southeastern U.S., has been in development for eight years. It has received all the necessary regulatory and environmental approvals for construction to begin but is still obtaining rights of way from local landowners.
An immediate need
In May 2017, the U.S. Forest Service gave final approval of the routing for TransWest Express and another large electric transmission project in the Rocky Mountain West, PacifiCorp's Energy Gateway South. TransWest Express is backed by billionaire oil tycoon Philip Anschutz, whose privately held Anschutz Corp. is also developing the massive Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project in Wyoming. The route extends from the Wyoming wind farms to a planned interconnection near Delta, Utah, and on to the Marketplace Hub near Hoover Dam in southern Nevada, which provides interconnections to the California, Nevada and Arizona grids.
Gateway South is a portion of a multistate PacifiCorp plan to add roughly 2,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines to its grid in the western U.S.
Fifteen central U.S. states hold the most potential for renewable energy development, including 88% of technical potential for onshore wind power and 56% of utility-scale solar photovoltaics, the Wind Energy Foundation report found. They account for less than one-third of future load growth, however, meaning that long-distance transmission will be critical for bringing that energy to market. Transmission planners, the report argues, are not fully accounting for projected new demand from corporate buyers in their deliberations.
"This report demonstrates that there is an immediate need for transmission planners to account for the significant renewable energy goals of corporate purchasers," Wind Energy Foundation Executive Director John Kostyack said in the release.

