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Canary Media’s Down to the Wire column tackles the more complicated challenges of decarbonizing our energy systems. Canary thanks CPower for its support of the column.
Clean energy projects are facing multiyear waiting lists and unreasonably high costs to interconnect to U.S. transmission grids — a well-known problem in the electricity sector. But what can be done about it?
That’s the question that brought members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and state-level energy regulators from across the country together earlier this month. In an all-day session, the joint federal-state task force examined the causes of interconnection congestion as well as potential solutions.
Massive transmission backlogs have become a serious impediment to expanding clean energy and providing customers with reliable and low-cost electricity. Solutions are hard to come by, however. Over the past decade, the scale of the solar, wind and energy-storage projects being planned and built around the country has boomed. But the methods grid operators and utilities use to assess the impacts and costs of connecting these projects to the grid haven’t kept up.
Grid-impact studies conducted by the major regional transmission organizations and independent system operators, which manage the high-voltage grids providing electricity to about two-thirds of the American population, have become increasingly complicated. These studies determine how much developers will have to pay for upgrades to allow their projects to interconnect to the grid and deliver power.
“Studies are taking four or five years in some cases,” FERC Commissioner Willie Phillips said at this month’s meeting between FERC and members of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC). “This is simply untenable.”
Interconnection reform has become an important piece of the broader transmission policy reform effort that FERC launched last year. FERC’s first big decision on this front came last month in the form of a proposal to revamp long-term regional grid planning. This could help expand grid capacity for more clean energy in the long run, and it has won support from NARUC for its inclusion of states in the decision-making process.
But in the meantime, FERC and state regulators need to explore more near-term solutions to the interconnection morass, according to industry advocacy groups American Clean Power Association, Advanced Energy Economy and the Solar Energy Industries Association. In a joint filing last year, these groups asked FERC to “take immediate steps to fix the acute procedural deficiencies and network upgrade funding problems plaguing the current interconnection process in many regions by initiating an accelerated, stand-alone interconnection rulemaking.”
FERC hasn’t laid out what it plans to focus on next in terms of its broader transmission reform effort. But how it chooses to approach interconnection reform could play a big part in determining whether the country can build out the hundreds of gigawatts of wind and solar power and batteries needed to meet state carbon-reduction mandates and decarbonize the grid quickly enough to mitigate the worst harms of climate change.
