Much of the US Energy Infrastructure Was Built When Elvis Topped the Charts

The vast web of electrical wires and pipelines that keeps America on the move, both physically and virtually, is showing its age.

The oil pipeline that ruptured beneath Mayflower, Arkansas, in 2013 was laid down when Harry Truman was president. The natural gas pipeline that exploded in a San Francisco suburb in 2010, killing eight people and destroying three dozen homes, was built the same year Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" topped the charts. Some of the major transmission lines that send electricity from power plants to cities date back to the New Deal era.

Meanwhile, climate change is adding more stresses onto the system, particularly in coastal areas that face rising seas and more intense storms. And new sources of energy, from North Dakota shale oil to Oklahoma wind farms, need to be connected to that web.

The US energy infrastructure now includes 2.6 million miles of oil and gas pipelines, nearly 650,000 miles of high-voltage electric lines that connect power plants to cities and more than six million miles of distribution wires strung throughout neighborhoods — and much of it is "simply old or obsolete," the Obama administration reported this week.

That conclusion was part of the first Quadrennial Energy Review (QER), which laid out what the administration thinks is needed to modernize the nation's energy infrastructure.

And it's no surprise to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), which gave the network a D-plus grade in a 2013 report.

Otto Lynch, the energy representative on the ASCE's Committee on America's Infrastructure, said recent developments are redrawing that complex web, and utilities are struggling to keep up.

"They're mothballing six coal plants in Ohio in the next month, and you're not going to build a wind farm in Ohio," Lynch told VICE News. "That wind power's going to come from Kansas or Montana. It's like a water system — you can't just inject water into another part and expect it to get where it needs to go with the existing system."

With solar energy growing in popularity and dropping in price, the grid may become more a like two-way street that allows solar users to feed surplus electricity back to the grid. And power lines now operate at higher temperatures than their designers expected, placing added stress on the metal, Lynch said.

"The utilities are doing a pretty good job of maintaining the lines, but it's Band-Aids," he said. "They're putting good Band-Aids on them, but there are only so many times you can put a Band-Aid on something before you need to rebuild it."

The environmental group Greenpeace gave the report a qualified thumbs-up, largely for its recognition of global warming as one of the drivers of the problem.

"The QER is refreshingly honest about the impact of climate change on the energy sector, and vice-versa," said Kyle Ash, the senior legislative representative for Greenpeace USA. "I think that's a very good thing. I don't think previous administrations would have been as honest about it."

But he added, "There's a denial about the timeline and about the need to phase out fossil fuels entirely."

"Ultimately, we say in the next 35 years, we need to phase it out totally," Ash told VICE News. "So if we're building something that has a lifetime of 50 years or longer, obviously that's problematic in terms of an investment. We don't want to create assets that will become stranded down the road. It's just a waste of money."

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Climate change means more demand for electricity for cooling in the South and greater vulnerability for facilities in places like the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, the Energy Department report states. For instance, when Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast in 2008, the damage it did to refineries there soon led to gas lines in cities like Atlanta, while flooding and power outages in the wake of Hurricane Sandy snarled fuel supplies around New York in 2012.

Addressing these problems can be thorny: The administration report quotes industry estimates that the US utilities will need up to $900 billion to upgrade power lines by 2030. Lynch said utilities have the money — but because no one wants a big power line in their back yard, it can take as long as 15 years to get a major high-voltage line approved.

"These lines that we built in the '40s and '50s were not designed to handle the amount of electricity that we're putting over them today," Lynch said. "But people don't want to build a new line to help carry that load."

The Energy Department report calls for "new urgency" in approving permits for energy projects, but notes that much of that process "depends on state and local decisions."

Follow Matt Smith on Twitter: @mattsmithatl

Image via Flickr