IE Questions: Super Grid! Spanning Continents In A Single Bound!

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Somewhere in the world, the sun and wind are always shining and blowing, and people are always using electricity. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get renewable power from the windy and sunny places to the power hungry places? That was presumably the thinking behind a question posed by an Inside Energy audience member: Would transmission losses be too high to sustain an international green power electrical grid? We answer it in this video explainer.

Educator Resources

Electricity Losses State By State: Interactive

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As part of our IE Questions project, Inside Energy investigated how much energy is lost as electricity travels from a power plant to the plug in your home. In the U.S., five to six percent of the energy in electricity is lost during transmission and distribution, but that varies widely state-to-state and year-to-year. See how your home state measures up.

Lost in Transmission

Lost In Transmission: How Much Electricity Disappears Between A Power Plant And Your Plug?

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How much energy is lost along the way as electricity travels from a power plant to the plug in your home? This question comes from Jim Barlow, a Wyoming architect, through our IE Questions project. To find the answer, we need to break it out step by step: first turning raw materials into electricity, next moving that electricity to your neighborhood, and finally sending that electricity through the walls of your home to your outlet.

Audio

Wyoming Wind Gridlock

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Energy rich states produce billions of barrels of oil and gas but are also home to some of the best renewable resources in the country. Earlier this month, a massive wind farm got the green light from the state of Wyoming. If it gets federal approval, it could be come the biggest in the country. But for now, there is no way to transport the wind energy, and as yet, no confirmed buyers at the other end.

Data

Rooftop Solar: The Next iPod?

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The drop in the price of a residential-sized solar system suggests that it is possible that distributed solar will be as disruptive of the electrical transmission grid as the iPod was to the music industry.