The AWEA Blog: Into the Wind


What about transmission line losses?

Posted: 2011-04-29 Tom Gray

Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu spoke yesterday at Dartmouth College, near my home town of Norwich, Vermont, and our local newspaper quoted him as saying that China's electric transmission system can carry power farther and more efficiently and that by contrast, U.S. transmission lines lose "as much as 80 percent of energy when transmitting electricity over long distances."
 
Now of course, it's not always easy to know what was actually said and perhaps reported inaccurately.  But since the question of transmission line losses has come up occasionally in the past, and anti-wind individuals have questioned whether electricity can be transmitted efficiently from windy rural areas of the U.S. to population centers, we'd like to set the record straight.
 
The U.S. utility system contains two general types of power lines, transmission lines and distribution lines.  Distribution lines, as the name suggests, are used to distribute electricity from substations to end users--they generally are far more numerous, run for shorter distances, and use lower voltage, while transmission lines operate at higher voltages and are used to carry electricity for long distances.  According to the U.S. Department of Energy, total line losses for the entire electric utility system, both transmission AND distribution, in 2007 were just 6.5 percent.
 
As AWEA and the Solar Energy Industries Association have previously urged, our nation needs a new system of transmission lines that can not only deliver renewable energy to population centers, but strengthen America's outdated and over-stressed transmission system and improve its reliability to benefit all customers.
 


5 responses

  1. Chandranshu Pandya September 1, 2011 11:11PM
    In most of the grid network in India, the transmission losses are much higher. Old equipment and systems are the mail reasons for these losses. It will , of couse, take time but the "smart grid" technology should bring about reduced losses to a large extent.
  2. Frank May 4, 2011 08:36PM
    For power production, the average wind speed is very important, because the amount of energy available goes up with the cube of the velocity, so it's important to put turbines where the wind blows. The other issue, is that the wind doesn't blow 100% of the time in a particular place, but it's blowing somewhere, so the better connected the wind farms are, the less likely they are to need fossil fuel backup generators.
  3. sarah May 3, 2011 09:30AM
    braydon=retard. <3 you :)
  4. Skip DeLong May 2, 2011 12:35PM
    I don't think it would be a bad idea to explain the difference between AC vs DC transmission lines and the relationship of line losses to the transmission voltage for AC liines.
  5. Samuel May 2, 2011 09:02AM
    6.5 percent loss? That sounds a little off, but I could be wrong. We do need better transmission infrastructure, however I feel we would be better off placing renewable production sources in pods where communities create there own energy, instead of transmitting it over thousands of miles. I debated this subject previously here - http://bit.ly/hXPvZB Keep up the good work!

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