Europeans are turning down the heat and turning down their sheets for a night’s sleep just as power demand in the Eastern United States is peaking around dinnertime. 

As early-to-rise and early-to-bed Northeasterners in the U.S. do the same a few hours later, Californians see a peak in their dinnertime energy demand. 

And as U.S. energy demand plummets, Eastern Asia is just cranking up. Likewise, as industry in each of these areas start ratcheting up its energy demand in the morning, there are other regions in the world that are reducing their energy demand. 

The problem is that our energy capacity must be built not for average energy consumption but for the peaks. This peak load power must be able to start up and shut down efficiently, which means it can’t be tied to wind or solar. It can be supplemented by batteries, but they remain expensive and somewhat inefficient. Instead, natural gas-powered “peaker” plants are typically used to make up the difference between peak and average electricity demand, with all their attendant higher long term costs and greenhouse gas emissions. 

Imagine if we could move power across continents and under oceans to smooth out these peaks and valleys. Well, we can. China has been moving power for years for their mammoth but remote hydroelectric plants. The Western World is now catching on. 

We have discussed in the past the new technology that makes it possible to move huge amounts of electric energy with very little losses. The technology, High Voltage Direct Current, can move power with a loss rate of just a few percent for every thousand miles. These losses are declining as the technology improves, but are already about half the loss rate of the standard transmission line, High Voltage Alternating Current. 

The HVDC technology can reduce energy losses in ways not possible a couple of decades ago. Since the current wars of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla in the 19th Century, we have used alternating current to raise the voltage when we transport electricity. Higher voltage allows electric current to move with more authority and less loss through their lines just as higher pressure can move more water through pipes. 

But, while the voltage of AC power is easy to move up and down, the movement of AC power creates another problem. It has the usual resistance loss just as DC current, but it also has a “reactive loss” that is unique to alternating current. That is why DC transmission is twice as efficient, for the same voltage, as is AC. 

Technology of late, in the form of ultra-high voltage semiconductors, has allowed electric grids to move DC voltage up and down with a similar cost and efficiency of the AC transformers like you may see at the top of the utility pole on the street outside your home. Innovators are experimenting with ever-higher DC voltages to improve efficiency even more. Unfortunately, permitting, the disjoint and self-serving nature of local utilities, an unwillingness to invest to address future energy needs, and Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) proponents fearful of innovations have held HVDC back in the U.S. And energy self-sufficiency, with abundant hydroelectricity, has reduced the incentive for HVDC conversion in Canada. 

It’s time to cut to the chase. Something new is now on the horizon, though. The HVDC technology has improved and costs have come down sufficiently to contemplate using HVDC for the peak load averaging described at the beginning of the blog. We now have the ability to move energy from areas with decreasing demand over the day to those areas with increasing demand, and then back again later when demand reverses. 

In this way, we are using the grid in a different way. In some sense, it replaces battery storage, while it also negates the need for expensive and greenhouse gas-emitting peaker plants. Instead of storing energy, all we need to do is shift energy around as demand ebbs and flows differently with each revolution of the Earth. 

Proponents are proposing to do just this with a large capacity undersea HVDC cable between Europe and North America. Already, such a line is being built not to power-shift, but to bring solar power from Morocco in sun-rick Africa to Europe, specifically 2,500 miles away to sun-challenged England to supply upward of 8% of electricity needs for the United Kingdom. 

Now a group of investors are exploring how to shuttle wind power under 2,500 miles of ocean between western England and eastern Canada and beyond to the northeast United States. The line is not only designed to operate intermittently from England’s wind resources to eastern North America, but also to shuttle energy in the reverse direction when demand is higher in Europe than it is in North America. This is a new innovation that opens up peak power averaging and obviates the need for expensive batteries to perform load smoothing. 

Obviously, these lines are not cheap, but they can move 6 Gigawatts back and forth, which is the electricity equivalent of half a dozen nuclear power plants. It is enough to power about six million homes. 

The problem with peak load averaging using HVDC lines rather than batteries is that we can see power lines but we don’t notice large scale battery energy storage systems (BESS). There are ways to replace current transmission wires with newer, more efficient, and higher capacity lines, and we can convert existing AC lines to DC, but even these seemingly unobtrusive changes require years of permitting and NIMBY opposition. A line traveling 2500 miles undersea, at depths that exceed 10,000 feet and well below the submarines of nations with a military interest in destroying energy transportation among NATO nations, can revolutionize energy efficiency and obviate the need to mine ever more lithium. 

At an estimated price of $25 billion, such an energy interconnect won’t be cheap. However, with wholesale electricity near $1600 per MWh or higher during peak demand in Texas, such a line can move $10 million of electricity every hour. A fully employed line can move $88 Billion of such costly energy every year. Even at normal peak rates of a tenth that Texas increasingly faces, the line could still pay for itself in about five years

Battery storage is also coming down. The sodium in ubiquitous sea salt and in deposits worldwide are 1000 times more abundant than the lithium that precipitated as the Earth formed, or was transported by asteroids from exploding stars well beyond our solar system. The innovation of sodium batteries will bring down the cost of battery storage and contribute to help humanity load-shift over a day’s energy usage. They fill the gap in times when solar panels and wind cannot generate electricity. 

What we need is an ambitious energy interconnect. A world in which we can now transport power thousands of miles, and perhaps someday to the other side of the planet, is now within our technological reach. U.S. adoption of HVDC lines is lagging behind Europe and Canada, and far behind China, primarily because of regulatory delay hurdles, NIMBY, and the unwillingness of 3,000 separate electric utilities to play cooperatively in the sandbox. They know that regulators allow any costs they incur to be passed on to consumers, so they have little incentive to innovate or cooperate. Other nations are not so hindered. 

It appears the only impediment in the U.S. is not the thousands of miles of ocean to span to interconnect energy but the six inches between our ears.