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E3Wise - One of the key needs to achieve a true digital grid is the ability to move electricity from one grid system to another.  Currently there are three main grid systems in the United States. Today to share electricity from one system to another requires stepped up and then stepped back down matching the grid requirements.  This process can cause the loss of up to 25% of the energy in the transfer process, that’s a lot of energy.  In areas like the Western and Texas Interconnections where large scale Wind, Solar energy farms are expanding this lack of integration has hampered selling lower cost alternative energy to utilities wishing to take advantage of lower cost and saving.   This story was published late last year and I think it is important because it shows that the move to a true digital grid is in process.

  Mitsui & Co. Takes $12M Stake in Tres Amigas
   By Jeanne Roberts on December 30, 2011

  Japan-based Mitsui & Co., Ltd (MITSY.PK), one of the largest global “sogo shoshas (general trading companies)” in the world, has bought a $12-million stake in Tres Amigas, a continental grid interconnection which eventually aims to tie together the nation’s three major electricity networks, the Western Interconnection, the Eastern Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection. It will do this while simultaneously integrating a wide array of renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

   Mitsui, operating in the arenas of mineral resources and energy, global marketing networks, lifestyle business, and infrastructure (the latter covering power generation, water supply, and rail, marine, and aerospace transportation), operates through 17 major and three regional business units with headquarters in Tokyo.

   Tres Amigas, Spanish for “three friends” is a $1.5 billion grid inter-tie that will be staged in four phases: Phase 1 beginning in 2012, with commercial operations in 2015 transferring an initial 750 megawatts (MW) between Texas and the Eastern U.S.; Phase 2, 750 MW, connecting the Western U.S. and the Eastern U.S.; and Phase 3, also 750 MW, joining Texas and the Western U.S. A fourth phase will tie Texas and the Eastern U.S. with 2 gigawatts (GW), with the entire project scalable to 30 GW.

   In addition to providing more grid security and increasing the reliability of the nation’s electric supply, Tres Amigas will create a market hub – the Tres Amigas SuperStation – which will encourage renewable energy developers to expand operations to reach multiple, often distant, national markets. This is the fulfillment of a dream in which renewable energy producers see wind from the Great Plains serving the crowded cities of the East and replacing that area’s primarily coal-fired generation, which is responsible for greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) that cause global warming.

  For example, a seminal study in Eastern Ohio in 2006 shows that burning coal for electricity accounted for 70 percent of the mercury present in rainfall in that area. And Ohio isn’t the worst offender. Kentucky and West Virginia burn far more. Published in Environmental Science and Technology, the study demonstrates how pervasively pollutive coal is in all its forms, from mining to disposal as ash piles.

  In terms of energy security alone, Tres Amigas offsets the piecemeal effect of a U.S. electric grid built in steps over the past 120 years -- aging infrastructure which also segregates the nation’s power supplies into three distinct groups, defeating the benefits that wide-open, sunny Nevada could offer, in terms of solar power (or hybrid solar/geothermal power), to crowded and often cloudy Pennsylvania.

  Tres Amigas, in connecting the Western Interconnection (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT), the Eastern Interconnection (the Southwest Power Pool or SPP) and the Texas Interconnection (the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, or WECC), will break this historic “gridlock” and help the U.S. achieve some serious “green” energy goals, including the addition of both short- and long-term jobs.

      Mitsui, in partnering with Tres Amigas, will become an active, equity partner, allowing the company to extend the international reach of its “Smart Green Information Technology” platform and business model, which includes Smart Grid IT, renewable energy development/management, and CO2 mitigation strategies. This development would hopefully precede potential U.S. carbon emissions plans like the failed Waxman-Markey Climate Change Bill (H.R. 2454) of 2009.  

  The best part? Using Mitsui (or other) grid integration software, Tres Amigas will smoothly integrate variable renewable energy resources at no risk to the grid, which is the concern traditional generators have about renewable energy.

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