The 2020GreenEnergy Plan
The California Energy Internet (CEInet)
The California Energy Internet (CEInet) will be California’s 21st-Century energy grid. There will be nothing else like it anywhere!
CEInet will embody:
These will be sufficient to meet all of California's energy needs and provide adequate reserves to guarantee that equipment or transmission failures will never require California to buy imported energy.
Superconducting transmission lines, cooled by liquid nitrogen flowing through their hollow interiors, have virtually no electrical resistance. They can carry several times the current of conventional lines, at far lower voltages and with a fraction of the energy loss.
This is no pipedream! A demonstration project is underway by a Mexican company to install superconducting power cables in a Mexico City substation, and eventually under the streets of Mexico City. Long-haul superconducting transmission lines will not be long in coming.
CEInet will collect energy from Certified CleanGreenEnergy Sources around the state, store it until needed, and deliver it anywhere in the state, and after California’s needs have been met, via Export Gateways to the rest of the nation.
CEInet will provide energy, at rates far below today’s, to homes, businesses, and other installations unable to meet all of their needs from their own rooftops.
Distributed energy storage will be one of CEnet’s strongest features. It will embody redundant energy storage systems in every local community and near wind farms and solar-thermal plants. Energy will be generated whenever and wherever the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, held until needed, then delivered anywhere in the state.
Energy storage will also make CEInet more robust in a variety of ways. Of particular importance is the isolation that it will provide between CEInet’s transmission links. A failure of a link will not cascade into neighboring links and cause them to go down as well.
In the national grid, such failures put much of the Northeast in the dark in 1965, 1976, and 2003. That won’t happen with CEInet. In fact, any failure above the level of a neighborhood substation generally won’t put anyone in the dark.
Distributed ownership is another important feature of CEInet. Components, such as generating facilities, transmission links, and energy storage units, can be built and owned by individuals and by just about any other kind of entity that can own property.
For example,
will each own a piece of CEInet.
Those parts of CEInet that are monopolistic in nature will be regulated.
A neighborhood substation, for example, and the lines connecting it to nearby homes and businesses are usually handled by one company, like SCE, PG&E, or SDG&E, and its operation will be tightly regulated.
Among energy providers, on the other hand, there will be plenty of genuine competition, and they will have only minimal regulation. If they don't compete, i.e., if pre-determined criteria for competition are not met, then full regulation will be automatically triggered.