The backbone of President Biden’s plan to use infrastructure spending to advance climate policy is a clean electricity standard for the power sector that has the potential to be the most aggressive ever enacted by the federal government.
Tucked into his $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal is the aim of “achieving 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035,” according to a fact sheet released yesterday by the White House…
Currently, the United States adds about 2 percentage points of clean energy to the grid annually. The new standard — when combined with hundreds of billions of dollars proposed for the grid built-out — would add closer to 5 percentage points annually, she said. It also would immediately help reduce emissions in other carbon-intensive sectors of the economy, she said.
I hope this is true. Biden could turn out to be the most productive democratic president since LBJ.
One major idea to help achieve this is a high-voltage, direct current ( HVDC ) electric power transmission system to transfer electricity from areas of surplus to areas of deficit. This is much more important than in the current system, because wind is much stronger in some areas like the wind belt from Texas to North Dakota and solar is stronger in other areas like the Southwest. [Conversely with the current system you simply move fossil fuel to generators in the various areas.]
So the question arises which is more important to people: preventing climate change or NIMBY (not in my backyard). Unfortunately I think you will find NIMBY is more important to people.
Solid state devices can now convert between AC and DC with high efficiency and DC transmission suffers far less radiative loss than AC. I believe sends all the power from the hydroelectric generators in the far north to the populated areas at, IIRC, 725 KV for that reason. But the entire electric distribution system is generally in poor shape. Especially needed if electric vehicles take over.