generated by solar in the Southwest as far east as Atlanta.

Expanding our ability to transport electricity great distances is a bad idea until we outlaw fossil fuel power plants.

Otherwise certain states will be happy to sell everyone else more cheap and dirty energy.

> Expanding our ability to transport electricity great distances is a bad idea
> until we outlaw fossil fuel power plants.
> Otherwise certain states will be happy to sell everyone else more cheap
> and dirty energy.

But, but, but ... didn't you see that the power lines would be capable of
carrying nice clean wind energy? How can you possibly be so cynical as
to recognise that we much prefer to keep selling coal-fired power instead?

Companies are shutting down local coal burners (even in coal producing states like Pennsylvania.) Why would they pay the additional cost to import coal-fired electricity from elsewhere?

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/319535020/coal-gas-nuclear-hydro-how-your-state-generates-power

You’re cutting your nose off to spite your face.

... there are even fewer reasons to expand long distance power transmission.

Coal is falling to cheap fracked gas and the relocation of dirty, high energy industries like steel making and aluminum smelting to other nations.

Modern combined cycle gas plants, and smaller diesel and gas turbines of any capacity, can be installed nearly anywhere gas is available, and most of these power plants are nimble enough to compliment variable wind and solar inputs.

The Humboldt Bay power plant in California, next to the closed nuclear power plant, is simply ten big diesel engines.

PGE

Cheap, easy, and qualified heavy diesel mechanics are everywhere, trained in local community colleges and trade schools, or the U.S. military.

But fracked gas is every bit as ugly as coal in the long run, taking maybe twice as long to kill the world, but killing it just the same.

Promoters of HVDC expansion in the U.S.A. are looking at the German power model, which is to provide big industry with cheap coal generated power, and charge households and small businesses very high rates to subsidize solar and wind projects.

You said the concern was coal.

Local generation of power is just great. However, the fact of the matter is, some areas of the country are better than others for production of wind (like Texas and Oklahoma) and solar (like the South-West.) To take advantage of that, we need transmission lines.

HVDC even addresses intermittency.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2016/012516-rapid-affordable-energy-transformation-possible.html

German industry is powered by coal with a window dressing of solar, wind, and HVDC. (The gas Germany imports from Russia is a continuing political drama, so Germany can't use it for electric generation at the scale we do in the U.S.A..)

When France has excess nuclear energy much of it wheels through Germany on its way to other nations. Of course the way it really works, from the electron's perspective, is that Germany uses the French nuclear energy, replacing it with coal generated energy along the way. But politically I suppose this lets Germany assert their anti-nuclear stance.

Germany conveniently charts it's daily electric power generation here:

https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm

Here's the 2015 summary:

options but nobody wants to think about that, guess. It would take away a lot of vulnerability out of the grid... which is getting pretty old.

they are huge and no one wants them on their property. Although they are called Clean Line, they combine dirty energy with wind.

I have a solar system on my house so I'm totally into alternative energy. I'm on 40 acres in the high desert NM and now I have giant PNM transmission lines cutting thru my property - taking down my property value big time. These lines are transporting wind energy to Arizona.

If Clean Line would stay in industrial corridors with their transmission lines, I would have no problem but they had a project started here in NM and wanted to go through private land in our small town.