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US Could Lower Carbon Emissions 78% With New National Transmission Network (smithsonianmag.com)
mdsolar writes with this story from Smithsonian magazine about how building a national transmission network could lead to a gigantic reduction in carbon emissions. From the story: "The United States could lower carbon emissions from electricity generation by as much as 78 percent without having to develop any new technologies or use costly batteries, a new study suggests. There's a catch, though. The country would have to build a new national transmission network so that states could share energy. 'Our idea was if we had a national 'interstate highway for electrons' we could move the power around as it was needed, and we could put the wind and solar plants in the very best places,' says study co-author Alexander MacDonald, who recently retired as director of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado."
If private investors are not willing to pay for it, then that is a sure sign that it is not going to generate an acceptable ROI, and shouldn't be built.
Companies exist for the next quarterly statement. Governments exist (or should exist) for their people, and it's precisely by investing in things with no immediate monetary payoff (infrastructure, scientific research, education, military, law enforcement, conservation, etc.) that they improve society as a whole.
Note that the primary motivation behind this proposal is lowering carbon emissions and fostering renewables. If you arrest climate change, that's a massive benefit to future generations, but it won't show up on any balance sheet. If you decrease pollutants, that results in longer, healthier lives. Heck, if it helps America achieve energy independence, that is perhaps another war or two we don't have to fight in the middle east. Facilitating $billions/year in commerce (to the benefit of shareholders and electric customers in general) sounds like mere gravy on top of that.
Not--mind you--that I'm arguing for this particular project. I'm just pointing out that government ROI gets to count the net benefit to all society (including future generations) whereas corporate ROI is defined strictly in terms of shareholder value.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Molten Salt did ultimately find a place though - just not in nuclear, the best tech we have for large scale centralized solar is molten-salt towers.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
> 'Our idea was if we had a national 'interstate highway for electrons' we could move the power around as it was needed, and we could put the wind and solar plants in the very best places,'
You don't have that? In 2016? WTF?
This is a great project to be done... in the Fifties. :-/