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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is climate attorney at EPIC, Matt Simmons. So we're talking about transmission lines today, which is, I think, one of the least understood parts of this whole offshore wind journey that we're talking about as a community, as a region. It's like one of the three legs of a stool here to support offshore wind. And there's also independent utility and transmission lines absent offshore wind as well. So we have an expert joining us, Matt. We have Arne Jacobson, the director of the Schatz Energy Research Center at Cal Poly Humboldt, who is going to help us understand transmission lines, electricity flow, all these things that are really confusing to the average person, but, you know, our old hat to Arne. So, Arne, thank you so much for joining the Econews Report.

ARNE JACOBSON:

Thanks for inviting me. Pleasure to be here.

WHEELER:

All right. So transmission infrastructure, this could be a subject that maybe causes some listeners eyes to glaze over, right? This is seemingly a very technical, complex thing that most of us never think about, like how our power gets to us in our system, but obviously incredibly critical. Transmission is one of the things that needs to be improved upon for us to be able to have offshore wind. So this is a necessary conversation that we're having as a community. But let's first understand like how we got there, how we need to have transmission infrastructure improvements in order to facilitate offshore wind. So it's kind of a conversation about where we are now and how we got to our grid system that connects Humboldt to the rest of the state. So Arnie, take it away. Tell us about our grid system and how it got into place and what are the kind of central limitations that it poses.

JACOBSON:

So this region is served by a few different transmission lines that the two main ones come over from the Redding area and what I would call in the transmission system scale of things fairly small, they're kind of capillaries if you want to do a circulatory system analogy, they're not the aorta. They're really designed to support or deliver power here to the coast. We have two main lines, we often talk about them in terms of the voltage of the lines and so those two lines are 115,000 volts each, so there's two 115 AV lines where the K refers to a thousand. And then there's also two 60,000 volt lines in addition and those 60,000 volt lines are really there to support small communities along the route, they're not really meant to deliver power into and out of the region. And so those two lines connect the Humboldt Bay region to the major transmission corridors that run up and down the I-5 corridor. The size of those lines is such that they can provide a decent fraction of the energy that we use in our region, but they're not actually even big enough to fully support the electricity that we use in this region and so we have power plants here on the coast that are also necessary for the system to work and really the anchor power plant in our region is Humboldt Bay Generating Station, which is located just south of Eureka in the King Salmon area and it's a natural gas fire power plant. It's rated at 163 megawatts and it's really the anchor of the system for our region.

WHEELER:

Yeah, so the natural gas power plant, fracked gas burning power plant here on Humboldt Bay, it's a fossil fuel power plant. It's contributing to our global climate crisis and we're tethered to it because of our transmission system, right? We, we don't have the ability to bring in enough power from elsewhere in the state. So we could have huge wind farms and solar plants elsewhere in the state, but here in Humboldt County, we're always going to be tethered to fossil fuels. Unless we somehow either have huge renewable production locally and also transmission line improvements. Is that right?

JACOBSON:

That's right. The way the system is set up, so it's useful to sort of just talk through the numbers a little bit. Our average load in this region is about 90 megawatts of power consumption. The peak load is probably on the order of 130 or 140 megawatts. So the Humboldt Bay Generating Station is rated at 163 megawatts. So it's big enough to carry the whole region by itself if needed. And then each of those 115 kilovolt lines can carry about maybe 75 megawatts. And they're meant to be redundant. So we really only have access to that one to 75 megawatts of import capacity to the region. So we're not an energy island up here, but we are an energy peninsula that needs the local generation in order for the system to work. I guess it's also useful to note that we produce a little bit of natural gas in this region. About 10 or so percent of the natural gas that's used here is produced locally, mostly in the Tompkins Hill gas field. But most of our natural gas comes through a single 12-inch pipeline that comes over from the Redding areas from Anderson, I think, and runs over the Highway 36 corridor and comes into the Humboldt Bay region. And so in addition to that being a fossil fuel powered system, there's also a single point of failure vulnerability, which is that natural gas pipeline. If something were to happen seismically or otherwise to that pipeline and it would be out, we would have no way to run the power plant for an extended period of time. There is some backup fuel that can be used to run it for a few days. But we would essentially be running on diesel at that power plant at that point, and there's only a few days of that on site in terms of storage. So there's both the fact that it's a fossil fuel plant that is contributing to climate change, but there's also just a regional vulnerability associated with the fact that we're dependent on that.

MATT SIMMONS:

So I'm not an expert by any means, but it's my understanding that because renewables are intermittent, grid reliability is super important, right? Because the wind isn't always blowing, but it's sort of always blowing somewhere. And so as long as you have a lot of wind turbines hooked up to a grid and that grid can reach everyone and reach all the wind turbines, you can have energy going 24-7, even if the renewable energy sources aren't generating 24-7. And so is that another sort of reason why we would want more more grid upgrades here in the North Coast?

JACOBSON:

It is. So yeah, the solar and wind and some other renewable energy sources are what are considered intermittent sources. And so they're dependent on their use on a widespread basis is dependent on all of that interconnection that the electrical grid provides. And so having enough capacity to move that power around to where it's needed and to fill in the gaps between all the various renewable generation sources is part of having an interconnected system that's based primarily on renewable energy. So expansion of grid capacity is part of not just here, but across the US and across the globe is part of the story of building energy systems that are primarily based on renewable resources.

WHEELER:

One thing that is on our horizon, metaphorically and maybe literally, is offshore wind. But our aged grid infrastructure limits our ability to have build-out of offshore wind because we have both import-export problem here, right? We're not able to bring in enough power to fuel Humboldt County. That also means that we're not able to export enough power to make an offshore wind project viable. And so the offshore wind conversation is driving interest at the state and federal level in grid infrastructure improvements for Humboldt County, which we haven't had in many decades. So let's think about what would be necessary for our grid if we're thinking about a future with offshore wind energy and how that conversation is going. And let's talk about some of the players who we will all become accustomed to as we move towards grid infrastructure improvements. I'll just let you take it from there. I feel like there's like a number of questions or a number of things that you can start to explain to me.

JACOBSON:

I'll start just with the offshore wind question and the scale issues in terms of the scale of how much wind generation there could be and how that relates to our infrastructure and the need for upgrades. So the Humboldt Wind Energy Area, which is about 20 miles offshore from Humboldt Bay, it starts about 20 miles and extends to about 30 miles offshore. It's an area that's about 207 square miles. There are two leaseholders who won leases in late 2022. If you were to fully build out offshore wind in that area, you know, the estimates that we had been working with as of a couple of years ago is that you could put maybe 1.82 gigawatts of installed capacity. I've been talking in megawatts, I just switched to gigawatts. A gigawatt is a thousand megawatts. So that's essentially saying that 1,800 to 2,000 megawatts of installed capacity could go into that wind farm that wind developers or the leaseholders indicate that they think that they could fit more than that. They think that they could fit something on the order of 3,000 to 4,000 megawatts of installed capacity in that region. And that's based primarily on the idea that they would be using larger turbines than we had assumed a couple of years back and the industry is changing really fast. So that's the reason for that. They're anticipating larger and larger turbines that could be used. So if you've got somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 megawatts of installed capacity for wind generation in that area and we have the capacity to export 70 megawatts, it doesn't take very much math to understand that we have a couple of capillaries and you need a couple of aortas or maybe even more than two.

SIMMONS:

You've been talking in megawatts and gigawatts, is there any sort of metric you can use to give listeners of a better sense of like just how much power that really is? Like how many homes it would power, like a city, like how much does the city of Eureka use, right? Like I'm trying to give listeners a sense. Yeah, so the...

JACOBSON:

The average regional load in the entire Humboldt Bay or Humboldt County area is 90 megawatts.

SIMMONS:

5,000 to 4,000 megawatts could be generated by, according to the developers, could be generated in the Humboldt wind energy area.

JACOBSON:

Yeah, so much, much more, 20 to 40 times more than we use on average here locally. And just as a point of reference, the peak load for the state of California is about 50,000 megawatts. And so if you're generating 2 to 4,000 megawatts in this wind energy area, it's a measurable fraction of the total state generation, something like between 5 and 10% of the state's current peak load. It's big. So yes, in order to do that, this region cannot absorb anywhere near that amount of power. We absorb a small fraction of that. And so there would be a need for large-scale investments in transmission infrastructure to expand that. Yeah.

WHEELER:

So let's talk about investments. Let's talk about the decision-making process and who, who gets to decide about transmission infrastructure. Is this going to be something that's paid for by the wind energy developers? Is it something that the feds pay for who is looking to invest in transmission infrastructure improvements? Like what is the body that gets to decide these sorts of things?

WHEELER:

So, we imagine that offshore wind energy is coming and it can't come until there's a way to get that power to the people who are using it. How long does it take? Because this sounds like it's a very complicated process, right? We're talking about new transmission lines, crossing multiple different ownerships. It seems complicated and long. How long on average does it take to figure something like this out? And what does that mean for our timeline for offshore wind energy development?

JACOBSON:

The transmission planning process itself is more or less a two-year cycle, but that's just the beginning of the process of actually permitting and then building transmission lines. I would say large-scale transmission projects typically take, from the time that the planning is happening to when it's actually built, if they're successful, it's on the order of 10 to 15 years, typically, and so it's not a fast process. We're not at the very beginning of that process. I think we're maybe towards the end of a planning cycle that could lead to a decision that the state wants to procure transmission lines to support wind development in the Humboldt Wind Energy Area. My understanding is that the California Independent System Operator will come out with a recommendation this spring in the next few months in relationship to that question. That wouldn't define a particular route, but it would define, we want to get transmission from this point to this point, and then they would, if that's approved, would put out a call for proposal from bidders to propose how one might do that. So my understanding is that all of that could happen during this calendar year, but then whoever is successful in that bid, they would have to do their own much more detailed planning and permitting before eventually being in a position to build that.

WHEELER:

listening to the Econews report. And thankfully, we have an expert joining us. Arne Jacobson, the director of the Schatz Energy Research Center at Cal Poly Humboldt. Y'all have been doing some of the early legwork thinking about what would transmission infrastructure improvements look like to facilitate offshore wind energy development and to make sure transmission is done in a good, equitable, and just way for our region. Do you want to talk a little bit about the report that y'all put out, I believe it was in October of last year, on transmission improvements and kind of the routes and the way that you as Schatz are thinking about this problem?

JACOBSON:

So we, through a contract that we had with the California Energy Commission, have been doing some analysis related to just trying to understand a few different dimensions of what would be needed for transmission to support offshore wind. So we were looking at some of the technical dimensions of how much transmission would be needed under a few different scenarios for possible offshore wind development. How much would that transmission cost? There was some preliminary analysis associated with the degree of permitting difficulties, especially looking at environmental permitting, and also understanding some of the both undersea and overland considerations, because part of this transmission infrastructure obviously has to be undersea because you're coming from an offshore wind farm. We, of course, did that work with partners. We were the lead for that effort, but we worked very closely with, in this particular study, four partners that carried different parts of the analysis. So I just want to note that we don't have all of that expertise in-house to do that, but that's how almost all of our projects work. We work with partners to make it all work. And so part of that analysis was thinking about if you were to develop offshore wind in the Humboldt wind energy area, what would things look like, and what would the transmission needs and costs, et cetera, be? We also looked at additional scenarios, thinking about the potential for offshore wind development in the future beyond the Humboldt wind energy area that considered a number of possible sites for offshore wind development between Cape Mendocino and Coos Bay. So we were looking at the Oregon coast as well as the northern California coast and what the transmission requirements might be. And for the moment, I'll just focus on the Humboldt wind energy area, but maybe later in the conversation we can talk a little bit about some of the other areas as well. For the Humboldt wind energy area, our estimate was that the cost to develop the transmission that would be needed would likely be on the order of $2 billion to $5 billion, depending on both technology choices and routes that might be chosen. That sounds like a lot of money. It is a lot of money, but it's actually not that much money in the bigger scheme of things compared to other large-scale transmission projects or things that will deliver that scale of renewable energy into the California grid. It's not a particularly inexpensive circumstance, but it's also not out of line with what you might expect for other things, like lots more solar in southwestern California, for example.

SIMMONS:

Just to clarify, having read the report, the low end of the $2-5 billion is an overland transmission route, and the high end of the $2-5 billion would be a deep-sea underwater cable going way out into the ocean, curving around, and then coming down to San Francisco.

JACOBSON:

That's right. Yeah. That's correct. So, yeah, the undersea ended up being considerably more expensive than overland. Each of them have their own challenges from a permitting perspective, but the cost is considerably higher for the undersea options. And from an overland perspective, I think the first place that you look at for routes is where are the existing power lines, because there's already a right-of-way established there. And we didn't do a detailed routing analysis. We just assumed that you would roughly follow existing corridors, that a more detailed routing study is something that would be a subsequent step. And so, one, the most obvious route that you would follow is the existing 115 kilovolt lines that run to the east, running along those corridors.

SIMMONS:

And do those corridors follow the highways or like where geographically?

JACOBSON:

Do they run? Yeah. Yeah. So they start at the Humboldt substation, which is in the Myrtle area of Eureka, actually Mitchell Heights, if you want to be really specific. And there are both of the redundant lines start at that substation. They go up through the Neyland area and there's a split and one of them runs through Maple Creek and then overland through a pretty remote area for a while and eventually meets up with Highway 299 near Big Bar and then follows Highway 299 through Junction City and Weaverville area and then eventually over to Cottonwood where there's a significant substation where they connect to the main power corridor. The other line, after going up through Neyland, runs over to Bridgeville and then follows Highway 36 over to the same spot in Cottonwood. So those rights of way were probably the first place you would look in terms of how you might run larger power lines. Those rights of way are not wide enough for the larger power lines, so you would have to look at expanding those rights of way if you were to follow those rights of way. And of course, you would have to expand them anyway because we need those 115 kV lines to continue to serve this region while you're building the larger ones. So you have to expand regardless because it takes a few years to build them, so you can't just take one down and build the third. And so expanding those rights of way would be part of what would be needed. It's not determined yet that those would be the rights of way, but that would be a logical place to look at as the next step. Now once you got over to the I-5 corridor, you probably would not connect if you're going with much larger power lines, so like 500 kV lines. You would not probably connect at Cottonwood, which is where the 115 kV lines connect because that's not a 500 kV substation. You would need to go to a different substation, probably to the east of Redding, where you would be able to interconnect. We were assuming that the interconnection point would be at something called the Fern Road substation, which doesn't yet exist but was just planned to be in place by the late 2020s. And that's where the California ISO and CPUC indicated that was the most logical place for those to connect.

WHEELER:

One thing I wanted to make sure that we touched on before we left was the idea of, of creating a more equitable transmission infrastructure or electrical infrastructure for, for our region. So if you are a listener out in Hoopa, you know that the power goes out quite frequently out there because it's kind of an old unreliable grid out in a pretty rural area and there, there's an opportunity for us here, right? The state and the federal government and private industry are looking to invest very substantial sums of money to be able to facilitate offshore wind energy development, to be able to have a better transmission infrastructure. In one scenario that could just mean quickly exporting the energy out of our area to other markets elsewhere in California. That's maybe not what we want as Humboldt County residents. We want transmission infrastructure improvements to benefit folks who might not have reliable electricity now in rural areas. Can you talk about scenario planning and figuring out a way that we don't just have these energy super highways that get out of the area, but that can still support, support rural communities like Hoopa, Upper River communities.

JACOBSON:

Yes, so I guess what I'll first say is, if these large transmission lines were built, there would need to be at least two of them for redundancy reasons. And that would, I think, I think it's very likely that there would be a connection between that system and our local system in the Humboldt Bay region. And so that would mean a few things. One is that you could, you would no longer need the Humboldt Bay Generating Station. Or if you did have it, it would run almost never, because those transmission lines would be large enough to bring power into our region to meet our regional load, even when it was totally calm out at sea and there was no wind generation happening. And so that would be true. It would also improve the reliability of electricity in the Humboldt Bay region, because you would have these very large transmission lines that were, that were, we would be connected to. What that would not do, though, is it would not improve the reliability all by itself, or some of the communities that you are referencing. So the communities that are served by smaller spur transmission lines that run out from the Humboldt Bay region, like mine that runs up to Trinidad and Big Lagoon and Orick, or the line that runs out to Maple Creek and then, and then Willow Creek and Hoopa, as well as some of the lines in southern Humboldt County, those, those areas are, are, in terms of their reliability, are primarily limited by the reliability of, and the capacity of those lines, as well as the systems in those areas. And so additional steps would be needed in order to make sure that, that reliability was also improved in those areas. One of the things that can be done to help improve reliability in those areas is, is to deploy microgrids in, in those areas. Renewable energy microgrids that include a combination of solar and, and maybe other generation sources, like small-scale hydro in places where that might be appropriate, as well as batteries and a control system that, that allow those systems to operate in island mode when you need them to, when the, when the power goes out. And that's something that we've been working on, including working quite closely with, with multiple tribal partners on those, that concept. So that's one thing that could be done and could, advocated for in, in terms of wider deployment of that technology to improve reliability in some of those, some of the areas that are currently served by, by some of these spur lines.

WHEELER:

And if folks want to listen to a show about that, we have a previous episode with Linnea Jackson, the director of the Hoopa Public Utilities District. So the show link will be in the show notes of the Lost Coast Outpost.

JACOBSON:

And I will say that the Hoopa Valley Tribe and Linnea Jackson are one of our partners and are a fantastic partner. We just really appreciated the opportunity to partner with Linnea and colleagues at the Hoopa Valley Tribe, as well as partners with the Yurok Tribe, the Karuk Tribe, and the Blue Lake Manchuria Tribe, and having conversations with a number of others as well.

SIMMONS:

I'm just going to jump in at the end here. You know, I fully support this conversation we're having about equitable power. I will just say, if someone in Reading turns on their light switch and it's powered by renewable energy, that actually will, in a sort of indirect way, benefit everyone, right? Because climate change is a global issue and we're all feeling local impacts of this global issue. And so I think sometimes we have this conversation, absolutely we need to make sure that local folks are getting the upgrades that they deserve and that they need, but I don't want to have the conversation be like, oh, it's Reading versus Humboldt or San Francisco versus Humboldt in terms of where the power is going, because we're all on the same planet. We're all sort of connected in that way. And so I just want to stress that in this conversation.

JACOBSON:

Matt? I think when we think about addressing climate change, we need to think about doing several things simultaneously. I think of it as three things. One is that we need to decarbonize our energy infrastructure and offshore wind and the associated transmission are a way of doing that in a significant way here in California. We also need to make the whole system more resilient to the impacts that climate change is bringing at us. Transmission infrastructure can be part of that story. Microgrids are part of that story. There's a lot that needs to be done to make ourselves more resilient to those changes. Third, we need to make sure that all of this is done in an inclusive and equitable way so that communities that have been under-invested in historically are not. I feel like really addressing the climate crisis is we need to be working on all three of those things in parallel. I think thinking of it that way and figuring out what investments need to be made in order to ensure that that's the outcome is really what we're focused on and committed to at the Schatz Center. I also think I'm seeing that people across our community and in state agencies are also increasingly beginning to understand that we need to be thinking about all of those things together.

JACOBSON:

Thanks so much, really appreciate it and I look forward to the next time. All right.

WHEELER:

Join us again on this home channel next week for more environmental news from the North Coast of California