A new HVDC connection will link renewable power to city centre demand
US gears up for ‘big transmission’
Good technology and better policies are set to bring clean power from America’s remote regions to city centres
A technologically advanced transmission line that will bring distant wind power to Portland, Oregon, is exactly the kind of project we will be seeing more of this decade, as surplus renewable energy increasingly needs to be exported from remote regions to city centres. The Cascade Renewable Transmission project (CRT) proposes to drop a 100 mile high-voltage direct current (HVDC) cable into the Columbia River from the drylands of the east, where the bulk of Oregon’s 8.55TWh of wind generation is already sited. The region is famous for hosting behemoth data centres operated by Google, Facebook and Apple. The tech giants flocked to the region last decade in search of cheap and clean electricity
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