The Department of Energy recently released its National Transmission Planning (NTP) Study, a set of long-term analyses that examine a range of future scenarios through 2050.
Earlier this month, the Department of Energy released the final National Transmission Planning (NTP) Study, a set of long-term planning tools and analyses that examine a wide range of potential future scenarios through 2050 to identify pathways to maintain grid reliability, increase resilience, and reduce costs, while meeting local, regional, interregional, and national interests and supporting the changing energy landscape.
What is the National Transmission Planning Study?
To understand the transformation needed for the U.S. grid and how that future buildout might serve the nation’s electric customers, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Grid Deployment Office (GDO) partnered with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) on the multiyear National Transmission Planning Study (NTP Study). The study sought to:
- develop new national grid-scale planning tools and methods that can be used by industry, especially when planning for interregional transmission capacity needs;
- identify potential transmission solutions that will provide broad-scale benefits to electric customers under a wide range of potential futures;
- inform planning processes for regional and interregional transmission; and
- identify interregional and national strategies to maintain grid reliability as the grid transitions, including to a reliance on low- and zero-carbon energy resources.
Key Findings:
- The United States will need to approximately double to triple the 2020 transmission capacity by 2050 to meet demand growth and reliability needs, and hundreds of billions of dollars of cost savings can be achieved through substantial transmission expansion and interregional planning.
- Accelerated transmission expansion leads to national electricity system cost savings of $270–490 billion through 2050.
- Constraining transmission growth results in higher cost portfolios with more nuclear generation, hydrogen, and carbon capture capacity required, especially when carbon emissions are limited.
- The identified benefits and expansion opportunities assume coordinated planning and use of transmission that goes beyond current practices. Developing guidelines for planners or a framework for coordination between numerous stakeholders can help realize these benefits.
