The 2020GreenEnergy Plan
Building CEInet
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CEInet will evolve step by step from California's present energy grid. New transmission links will be added and existing links upgraded, one at a time. As CEA-Certified CleanGreenEnergy Sources become available, they will be integrated one by one into CEInet, in accordance with CEA guidlines. Conventional fossil-fuel plants will be permitted to transport the energy they generate via CEInet during their remaining years of economic viability. CEInet will not provide transmission for any plant that operates at an economic loss. Unlike CEA-Certified CleanGreenEnergy Sources, fossil-fuel plants will not be considered to be part of CEInet. Certified CleanGreenEnergy Sources will gradually become the dominant source of energy, as fossil-fuel generating plants become less economically viable. As this happens, we all will pay less for electricity, our air will be cleaner and our skies bluer, and people with asthma, bronchitis and emphysema will breathe easier. |
Around the year 2012, the first large-scale energy storage elements will be integrated into CEInet. Virtually every community in the state will eventually have them, as will solar-thermal plants and wind farms. With large-scale energy storage will come the dawn of a new era in energy management in California. We can begin to meet our nighttime energy needs with stored solar and wind energy, and we will depend less and less on fossil-fuel generating plants when the Sun goes down. 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 will not happen with CEInet. In fact, any failure above the level of a neighborhood substation generally won't put anyone in the dark. |