The aging, under-sized and Balkanized U.S. high-voltage electric power grid has emerged as a significant bottleneck to greater development of necessary technology to meet the nation’s goals for greatly reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power sector.
The problem isn’t just this nation’s inability to build new transmission lines across state boundaries, when the states in the path of the sender and receiver gain no benefits. Another significant issue is the bureaucratic and regulatory morass that makes getting a new generator connected to the grid often more daunting that building the capacity.
Covering the start of construction last month of the $3 billion TransWest Express Transmission project, a 732-mile, 3,000-MW high-voltage, direct current line to move wind power from Wyoming to California, Arizona, and Nevada, Politico headlined the story “Need a power line? That’ll be $3B and 18 years.”
The story commented, “The delay (which is now old enough to vote) highlights a major challenge for grid projects: permitting. The process is complex and time-consuming, even for projects backed by the administration.”
A recent Reuters special report highlighted a regulatory system “controlled by a Byzantine web of local, state and regional regulators who have strong political incentives to hold down spending, according to Reuters interviews with grid operators, federal and state regulators, and executives from utilities and construction firms.” Projects that have everything lined up and ready to go are stalled by inability to get interconnected to the grid.
Energy executive Sarp Ozkan, vice president of Commercial Product at Enverus, an energy consultancy, recently told POWER magazine, “In essence, projects are all queued up with nowhere to go. Our grid is too old and fragile to handle the onslaught of renewables that it is being asked to integrate into its generation mix. Thus, most interconnection agreements end up requiring significant, and often economics-crushing, grid upgrade requirements often after years of arduous and costly feasibility and study stages.”
Last May, the Natural Resources Defense Council looked at the grid queue problem in the nation’s largest independent grid, the PJM Interconnection, which serves 65 million people in 13 eastern states and the District of Columbia. The NRDC study titled “Waiting Game: How the Interconnection Queue Threatens Renewable Development in PJM” found that “the country’s largest grid operator is unlikely to approve new renewable projects quickly enough to even meet mandatory minimum state standards.”
NRDC noted that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has great incentives for new renewables but grid connection molasses could stimy that. “As of September 2022,” NRDC reported, “there were more than 202 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy resources waiting for PJM approval, over 95 percent of total queued projects. The PJM interconnection queue is the sluggish process by which new renewable projects seek connection to the bulk power grid. Queue reforms have been approved to clear the years-long backlog, but it is unclear how effective they will be in facilitating the historic clean energy growth anticipated under the IRA.”
Several states and three major regional multi-state transmission operating organizations have recognized the interconnection problems, including the need for new transmission and permitting reforms, S&P Global reported last month. Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont, joined by PJM, the New York Independent System Operator, and ISO New England are asking the Department of Energy to assist in forming a Northeast States Collaborative on Interregional Transmission.
Energy consultant Ozkan summarized the interconnection conundrum: “For utilities, it is quite simple. Their grid is the biggest risk. Aging grids and ever lower spending on maintenance continue to be the critical point of weakness. The utility model doesn’t lend itself to spend on this weakness, which exacerbates the risk. We do see the solar, wind, and storage project queues across the ISOs have more capacity than can be supported by the grid or by demand moving forward. Thus, we should continue to see approximately 80% of the projects in the queue eventually getting suspended.”
–Kennedy Maize