New technologies could boost U.S. grid capacity

CLEVELAND -- With all the headaches involved in commandeering strips of land for new power lines, interest is growing in several new technologies that can wring more capacity out of the existing electricity infrastructure.

Whether they're cables that can carry more juice or digital switches that can make rapid-fire routing decisions, experts say there is no shortage of ways to improve upon the 1960s-era technology that pervades today's delicate electricity grid.

"The existing rights of way are going to be the first areas to be exploited," said David Kurzman, an alternative energies analyst with New York investment bank H.C. Wainwright.

Technology is the easy part. A knottier problem is the regulatory morass the industry finds itself stuck in.

"Most of these problems could be fixed today with existing technologies," said Eric Prouty, an energy technology analyst with Boston investment bank Adams, Harkness & Hill. "It's more a legislative and policy issue than it is a technology issue."

The Department of Energy said as much three years ago.

The agency's report on a wave of power outages that hit East Coast cities in 1999 found that utilities' cost-cutting had "considerably eroded" the grid's reliability.

Now the system is under heightened scrutiny again because of the Aug. 14 blackout, in which a cascade of failures and automatic shutdowns turned out the lights for some 50 million people in parts of Ohio, Michigan, Ontario, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Many feel that the blackout will turn attention toward adding more capacity to the grid -- especially in heavily populated swaths of the United States and Canada -- but not necessarily by erecting new transmission towers and lines.

Two companies are developing wires made of ceramic-based superconductors that can carry as much as five times the power of current steel-reinforced aluminum cables while withstanding the high temperatures that produces.

One, Intermagnetics General Corp. of Albany, N.Y., has developed a cable made of strands of ceramic-coated tape. Like conventional underground electric cables, the ceramic cables have a liquid core that carries a coolant. But instead of filling them with oil, these cables are cooled by 300-degree-below-zero liquid nitrogen, said Glenn Epstein, the company's chief executive.

Intermagnetics has already completed short demonstration projects and is preparing a quarter-mile connector between two electric substations in Albany, Epstein said. The expensive cable is meant to replace conventional cables in urban areas where capacity is tight.

In a similar project, American Superconductor of Westborough, Mass., is overseeing a project that will bury a half-mile-long, high-capacity cable on New York's Long Island to carry power for 300,000 homes. It's expected to be in use by 2005, with cables ready for commercial use a year or two later, said company vice president John Howe.

"Superconductors really provide the bandwidth increases that are going to be necessary to run the grid in the future," Kurzman said.

In the shorter term, 3M Co. and other manufacturers have developed high-capacity overhead power lines made of an aluminum-zirconium composite. The cables, which already are being manufactured for sale, can carry two to three times as much power as current cable, said John Cornwell, spokesman for 3M, based at St. Paul, Minn.

While superconductors must be buried, the 3M cables could replace existing lines on transmission towers, and connect directly into substations without modifications, Cornwell said.

Other grid-boosting solutions include software and switches to steer power around bottlenecks and onto less crowded wires, and line sensors that transmit temperature and wind data to a utility control room, telling computers to reduce a load when wind stops cooling a power line, for example, said Luther Dow of the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif.

Investors are also looking into stringing more high-voltage power lines ferrying direct current rather than the usual alternating current, said Steven Taub, a power technology researcher with Cambridge Energy Research Associates. A few long-distance DC cables are already in use in North America.

DC lines are cheaper and can share rights of way with AC lines. The cables can carry far more power, and can be turned on and off like water spigots, making billing more accurate, Taub said.

"Space is very tight," said Paul Halas, chief operating officer GridAmerica, which is taking over long-term control in October of the grid at the center of the blackout inquiry, owned by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp.

GridAmerica, which also will take over interstate power transmissions for two other Midwest utilities, says it will invest $500 million in adding more capacity to the lines, or building new lines.

"Our best estimate is that the bulk of the effects would be on existing rights of way," Halas said.