Our Infrastructure Is Too Old

We Need to Stop Living Off The Legacy of Our Grandparents

By Matthew L. Wald

Twelve astronauts have ever walked on the moon. As of this writing, just four are still living. The youngest is Charles Duke, who turned 89 on October 3. What have we been doing lately?

Putting a man on the moon isn’t the most important engineering accomplishment of the modern era; that’s probably electrification. But the moon landing is the flashiest, and people often refer to the greatness of a country that put a man on the moon.

But we didn’t put an astronaut on the moon; our grandparents did.

To be fair, the world has made lots of technical progress in the half-century since then, especially in medicine and communications. But there is a problem here. Analysts worry over the Baby Boom generation, a bulge in the population, passing into retirement and then into the years of peak health care needs. There’s another bulge in the system, though, and it’s not people. It’s the infrastructure, the built environment we live in, and rely on.

Some old stuff is famous and not anything to worry about. The Statue of Liberty’s 138^th birthday is a few days after Charles Duke’s 89^th. The Brooklyn Bridge is three years older than the statue.

But while we’re in the neighborhood of lower Manhattan, I’m more concerned with the Holland Tunnel, which will soon turn 100 years old.  Nearly 15 million vehicles a year use the tunnel. Traffic in the tunnel is stop-and-go at either portal most hours of the day, and often at a crawl through the old cast-iron tubes 93 feet under water. Traffic in the slightly younger Lincoln Tunnel and George Washington Bridge, the only other crossings from Manhattan to the west, is similar, and it has been driven up by another infrastructure failure, a fire in 1974 on a rail bridge built over the Hudson at Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1998. That bridge is now open only to pedestrians. The result is that rail freight bound for New York City or Long Island from west of the Hudson gets transferred to trucks in northern New Jersey, which then clog the river crossings and the city streets.

But we don’t do infrastructure any more, so getting the money and the political will together to fix the problem has been incredibly slow. Engineers and even bulldozers started work on a pair of new rail tunnels under the Hudson River twenty years ago, but Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey cancelled it in 2010. There is talk of reviving it.

Physically smaller technologies, like next-generation microchips, march ahead, but for the big stuff, there is a stop-start stutter to the idea of adding new infrastructure. It’s fine to add factories that make computer chips, but at some point the health of the infrastructure depends on deploying cement mixers, for highways, bridges, tunnels and runways.

Old, Old, Old

Lots of critical stuff is older than 100 years. According to the Army Corps of Engineers, 55 dams still in use were completed before 1800, the oldest from 1640.

None of these compares, though, to the lacuna in the nuclear industry. We are facing a market and R&D failure. The stars are finally in alignment for nuclear rebirth, with sharply higher demand growth forecasts in the United States, enormous shortages in the developing world, a looming environmental nightmare of human-caused climate change, and a public that now has a receptive view.

What’s missing is a proven, demonstrated product that the industry is ready to sell. Hence the odd stopgap of trying to re-start half-century-old reactors. Palisades, in Michigan, opened in 1973 and shut in 2022, is coming back into the limelight like an old rockstar. Fans are lining up, money in hand. In addition to $1.52 billion from the Department of Energy, it’s also getting a loan of $1.3 billion from the Agriculture Department. Three Mile Island unit 1, now the Crane Clean Energy Center, is also being revived. {link to Double Symbolism piece?}

A comparison with the automobile industry is instructive. It has lean years and fat years, and offers a range of products to fit various market contingencies. Its development cycle is long enough that engineers are designing vehicles that will hit the market at a time that isn’t predictable when the car or truck is on the drawing board. Maybe the market in the 2030 model year will be demanding hybrids, or pure electrics, or big vehicles, or tiny vehicles. Like a restaurant that offers steak, vegan, and sushi, the car industry has something for almost everyone, even if it doesn’t know who will walk in the door and what menu they will ask to see.

And customers who want to buy a 2030 Impala or Taurus or Camry have enough confidence to do so even if what they’re buying is a morphed, modified version of what hit the roads in previous years. Detroit does not bring back the 1975 Dodge Dart, even if it puts the Dart nameplate on a new model.

In contrast, any small modular nuclear or advanced reactor that a utility buys now will be first-of-a-kind, which means the cost and amount of time needed to build it are highly uncertain. Contrast this to plants that burn natural gas. These can be ordered off the shelf, so to speak. They are tweaked from iteration to iteration, but the buyer has a clear idea of cost and schedule.

Adding New Infrastructure is an Epic Slog

Important parts of our electricity infrastructure don’t need replacement, just expansion, and occasional refurbishment. But that’s not going well either. Take the case of the Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission line. (Power lines are usually named for places nobody outside the electricity industry has ever heard of. The Hickory Creek substation is in Dubuque County, Iowa, and the Cardinal substation is to the northeast, in Middleton, Wisconsin.)

The system for approving transmission, always cumbersome, has gotten more so in places that have switched to an Independent System Operator method of grid operation, the so-called “deregulated” areas. These are not really deregulated, but just differently regulated, and they now cover more than half the United States, electrically speaking.

A few days ago, the line was energized for the first time, thirteen years after the regional grid operator, the Midwest Independent System Operator, ran it through a lengthy analytical process and then approved it. The goal is to pull about 4 gigawatts of power from 160 wind and solar projects (about four big nuclear reactors’ worth, except that the line will seldom be fully loaded) from South Dakota and Iowa north into Minnesota. Sponsors say it will lower electricity bills there by more than the line’s $655 million price. The issue isn’t money.

It took only three years to build the 102-mile line. The project needed approvals beyond the grid operator, from, for example, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, the Iowa Utilities Board, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities service, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Fish & Wildlife service. Then there were the legal challenges, by the National Wildlife Refuge Association, the Driftless Area Land Conservancy and the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation. These worked their way up through the courts.

The striking fact about the Cardinal-Hickory Creek line is that the delay in that project is not unusual. Grid additions should be booming right now, if we are going to build wind and solar farms where the wind blows and the sun shines best. Instead, in the 2020s, the system is adding only about 20 percent as much new transmission capacity as it did in the first half of the 2010s, according to a study by Grid Strategies, a company that consults mostly for the wind industry. The study found that from 2010 to 2014, the system was adding 1,700 miles a year, and from 2015 to 2019, 925 miles a year. In 2023, it added just 55 miles. (The whole system, built over more than a century, is about 160,000 miles.)

This isn’t remotely compatible with President Biden’s noble idea of decarbonizing the grid by 2035.

As Dan Yurman, the energy blogger, says, the problem with getting anything done is that the system has too many umpires, and not enough players.

One reason that the grid and the rest of the energy infrastructure is so hard to modernize is that we are trying to solve national problems with local decisions. This problem isn’t unique to the grid; another case that makes our energy system more expensive and less clean than it should be is management of nuclear waste.

On the grid, inadequate transmission means that the system operator can’t use generators in price order, instead, technicians run more expensive generators while cheaper ones lay idle, because of congestion. It also means better sharing of generating resources in a way that minimizes the need to build expensive generators and reduces the possibility of running short in any given area.

The way the electricity system is now regulated, with a division between the generators and the companies that provide electricity to homes, business and factories, implies that energy will be competitively sourced from many different places. That means it will need to travel more miles on a bigger grid. And if those sources are wind and solar, the producer has to go where the resource is, not simply where rail cars full of coal or pipelines full of gas can make deliveries.

And the electric system is being told to take the place of pipelines, as we try to electrify transportation and home heating. Energy formerly transmitted through pipelines for natural gas, diesel or gasoline will now go over high-voltage transmission lines. It’s not just that the system is old, it’s that the system wasn’t designed for the modern paradigm.

But while the transmission system isn’t keeping up, the problem is worse on the generation side. Running the system on the technology and construction legacy of our grandparents only works if the load being served isn’t changing.  But it is changing.

Consider the idea of running data centers on small nuclear reactors. The data centers are being built today, and the projection is that in the late 2020s there will be a lot more of them. When can we break ground on ten or twenty small modular reactors? Maybe the mid 2030s, if we’re lucky. We dropped the ball on developing new products and today we’re simply not ready.

It’s hard to know what the 2030s and the 2040s are going to be like, but it’s a good bet that they will be tumultuous. A prudent, conservative approach is to hedge our bets. And that’s going to mean doing something new. We didn’t get where we are by not doing something new.

And it is clearly time to think about what infrastructure we will leave to our grandchildren.