That results in a 1 to 3% decrease in overall plant efficiency and higher capital costs. More fuel is required to produce the same amount of electricity.

Repeal or relax this ruling and new plants could be cheaper and more efficient.

When the last environmentalist is strangled with the entrails of the last lawyer, then we will have new sources of energy. But, not before that.

And cost a whole lot less money too. But where is the glamor in doing that?

The key is that the MSM was totally deluded in thinking that anything was going to happen with nuclear, transmission upgrades, or significant capacities in alternative energy.

It was all pie in the sky crap before the economy melted down, but now it is totally impossible.

I await a sea of retractions, in vain.

Marty, thats why all the “new” transmission lines are in upper 100KV’s on voltage (with some new ones over one million KV), the higher the transmission voltage, the lower the line losses.

I think the ammont of power lost from T&D is a bit overstated. I memory serves me, I think its around 7%.

I acknowledged that there existing central heating and cooling systems in the US in my original comment. San Francisco has or had one a few years ago. The down has the highest density of people in the state. The US had more but they have often gone out of business over the years.

Note that your eagerness for central heating runs counter to Marty’s hope for more efficient transmission of energy. Electricity and pipeline natural gas are the most efficient energy transmission media. The hot water, steam, and chilled water systems of central systems are short range systems due to high heat loses over distances.

Electrical transmission is relatively efficient. The losses are from resistance, inductance, and static. The fixes are then 1) more expense for metal and hence for supports, 2) more space between conductors making them MORE invasive and 3) none. The system is pretty well balanced economically right now.

The next step up is high voltage direct current at 1,000,00+ volts. But they still lose from static and from AC/DC and DC/AC conversion at either end so they tend to be long distance lines or between isolated AC grids. You can tell a DC high voltage transmission circuit by it having only two wires. One drives under one on I-5 in Sylmar on the north end of Los Angeles.

Seems like this would be huge, and maybe GE, ABB and Siemens are working on it, but this seems like an area where some sort of govt support might actually be worth considering.

Just a thought.

Carsten & Schewe, in the article I link here, suggest that a major reason for the lack of district heating development in the US is regulatory.

With deregulation, they are expected to be common carriers connecting multiple independent generators operating in a market. That’s a lot different job and the current design is ill-suited for it.

Worst, there is not profit for a new transmission line. Opportunities for bottleneck relief exist but the transmission builder would need to capture most or all of the economic advantage. Either the transmission owner is not allowed to capture that economic rent or few such opportunities exist.

Here in California, we had one place where GE Capital financed an upgrade to Path 15 between Central California and Los Banos at the southern margin of the San Francisco Bay Area. They got good terms but only because government had been extremely embarrassed by the power outages of 2001.

As to central heating, it exists in the US but it only makes sense with very high load density. Plus, no one wants a large power generator downtown in the midst of an urban area. I was just in Sweden where they are more common but the load factors are much higher too.

One should remind oneself that there usually is a good reason that other reasonable men before one may have thought something through too. Most existing arrangements have their reasons.