LineVision and GE Partner to Strengthen the Electricity Grid to Handle More Renewables • TechCrunch

A die the biggest hurdle to decarbonizing the grid is getting electricity from point A to point B.

But that’s often easier said than done. Today, almost a terawatt of carbon-free generation capacity is waiting to be connected to the grid. That’s enough to decarbonize 80% of US electricity by the end of the decade, according to the Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

To get there, however, the Grid needs a few upgrades, which also couldn’t come at a better time. The US power grid is aging – 70% of transmission lines are over 25 years old – and obsolete – it was originally designed for massive fossil-fuel power plants, not distributed renewable sources.

But new transmission lines – the big, high-voltage wires that form the backbone of the network – 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, for the past five years, LineVision 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 expanded its team and moved to new offices down the street from Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts, where it incubated. It has also expanded its partnerships with major utilities.

Now, LineVision tells TechCrunch that it is partnering with GE’s Grid Solutions division, integrating its dynamic line assessment technology with GE’s complementary offerings 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, which are necessarily cautious about integrating new technologies – after all, the network crash has some pretty big consequences.