One of the The biggest hurdle to decarbonising the power grid is getting electricity from point A to point B.
But that is often easier said than done. Today, almost a terawatt of carbon-free generating capacity waiting to be connected to the grid. That’s enough to decarbonise 80% of US electricity by the end of the decade. according to to the Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
To get there, however, the network will need some upgrades, which couldn’t come at a better time either. The US power grid is aging – 70% of transmission lines are older than 25 years — and outdated — it was originally designed with huge fossil fuel power plants in mind, not distributed renewable resources.
But new transmission lines — the large high-voltage wires that form the backbone of the power grid — are expensive. Depending on the voltage and where they are built, they start at over $1 million per mile and go up from there.
That’s why we have the past five years Line Vision has been working on a way to free up additional capacity on existing transmission lines. The startup recently closed a $33 million Series C led by Climate Innovation Capital and S2G Ventures. With the new funding, the company has expanded its team and moved into new offices just down the street from Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts, where it has been incubating. It has also expanded partnerships with major utilities.
Now LineVision tells businessroundups.org it is partnering with GE’s network solutions division, integrating its dynamic line rating technology with complementary offerings from GE to give utilities a more comprehensive way to monitor their transmission lines and increase the amount of electricity they can safely carry.
The partnership was driven in part by utilities, who are necessarily cautious about integrating new technologies — after all, crashing the power grid has pretty big consequences.
