The birth and troubled childhood of an American supergrid

It may seem ironic that the pioneer of projects that could lead to the sharpest increase in emissions-free electricity in the United States started in Wyoming, the state that leads U.S. production of coal, ranks in the top 10 for natural gas production and pumps 2 percent of the nation's oil. The project started with a 320,000-acre cattle ranch in Carbon County on Wyoming's southern border. In 2006, Philip Anschutz, the ranch's billionaire owner, put it up for sale. Then one of his top aides, Bill Miller, pointed out that the ranch is swept by some of the steadiest, most powerful land-based wind resources in the world. If there were some way to capture and transmit the ranch's wind energy to California, one of the world's richest markets for emissions-free electricity, that would certainly be a better economic proposition. Anschutz could keep the ranch, continue to raise cattle on it and harvest its formidable wind energy at the same time. Was that possible? Miller and Anschutz did some research and discovered there might just be a way. By then, a technology called high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) power lines had matured and seemed ready for the task. Most Americans think of Thomas Edison when it comes to direct current, which he used to light up Lower Manhattan in 1882. But Edison's DC proved to be too weak to move electricity much more than a mile beyond a power plant. A Serbian-American inventor, Nikola Tesla, came up with a better idea using an alternating current, or so-called AC electricity, that moved in a regular, wavelike pattern. He also invented a transformer that could step up AC power to carry it over longer distances.