As load woes grow, Hitachi Energy doubles down on HVDC in the US

Power equipment giant Hitachi Energy will be ramping up production of its high-voltage direct current tech to supply a series of projects to connect the eastern and western regional power grids, it announced this week. The agreement is in partnership with Grid United, the utility-scale transmission developer of the projects.

• The top line: The agreement comes as large swaths of the country are grappling with how to meet immense load growth from domestic manufacturing, electrification, and data centers. A major element of that work is squeezing more electrons out of the existing grid infrastructure. HVDC technology — which is more efficient and cheaper over long distances than traditional AC cables — isn’t new to the grid toolbox, but has seen a major uptick in installations in recent years.
• The market grounding: Conversations about how to add more transmission capacity between regional power grids abound, and Grid United’s Hitachi Energy projects are far from the first to propose doing so. In a 2020 study, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that upgrading or replacing the seven high-voltage links between the eastern and western grids, as well as adding more connections, would allow the power system to balance generation and load with less installed capacity, thanks in part to increased operating flexibility. 
• The current take: North America has typically been behind Europe in HVDC installations, but momentum is starting to build, said Anthony Allard, Hitachi Energy's executive vice president and head of North America. “If I look back five years, it’s night and day,” Allard told Latitude Media, adding that the dramatic shift reflects a growing interest in how to get more capacity out of existing assets. 

The agreement represents a new business model for Hitachi Energy in the U.S., the company said. Signing multiple contracts upfront for future projects will allow it to plan in advance to ramp up manufacturing capacity, train a workforce, and increase standardization to ensure each successive project is more efficient than the last.

Houston-based Grid United has five projects underway that would connect regions of the U.S., all in the planning and development phase. Grid United company Continental Connector, for example, is developing a line to link infrastructure in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Ford County, Kansas. The company is currently studying several corridors for the proposed project, and expects to get final approvals in 2025, with the new line operational in 2030.

Other projects in the works, like the Three Corners Connector between Pueblo, Colorado and the Oklahoma Panhandle, could be online as early as 2028.

Ramping up

As of late 2023, Europe had around 50 gigawatts of operational HVDC projects, with 130 additional gigawatts planned over the course of the next decade. The U.S. has yet to see quite that level of momentum, and is also lagging behind China and India, but recent years have seen a handful of massive projects start to get off the ground.

Hitachi Energy, for example, will also supply a HVDC  converter station for the planned Champlain Hudson Power Express, an interconnection that will deliver up to 1,250 megawatts of hydropower nearly 400 miles, from Quebec to New York City. That project is expected to come online in 2026.

Elsewhere in the country, Pattern Energy has begun construction of its SunZia Transmission project, a 550 mile HVDC transmission line that will transport 3,000 MW of wind power from New Mexico into Arizona.

“I think there’s an acknowledgement that this is a technology that can make a big difference," Allard said. "It's a tech that has been mastered and deployed around the world for the last 50 or 60 years."