Surge in clean generation and storage projects creating a backlog on U.S. electric grids
Energize Weekly, April 26, 2023
A surge in clean energy projects – a 40 percent year-over-year increase in 2022 – is creating a traffic jam in getting onto the U.S. electric grid, according to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study.
There are more than 1,350 gigawatts (GW) of generation and 680 GW of storage waiting for approval to connect to the grid, and wait times have ballooned to five years in 2022 compared to 3 years in 2015 and less than two in 2008.
To accommodate the growing number of projects will require an expansion and updating of the grid with about $1.5 trillion in investment between now and 2050, according to energy consultant BloombergNEF.
There are currently 10,262 projects in the queue waiting to connect. That is expected to grow with the tax credits and grants for clean energy in the federal Inflation Reduction Act signed into law last August.
“Without greatly increasing the pace of transmission expansion, we’re not going to see the results the IRA promised,” Julia Selker, executive director of the WATT Coalition, which represents renewable energy and grid service companies, told Utility Dive.
Ninety-three percent of the capacity is in zero-carbon projects, with a significant share of the projects combining wind or solar generation with storage. Natural gas-fired generation makes up the remaining portion of the capacity.
Not all projects that put in applications to connect to the grid do so. Only about 21 percent of projects, equal to 14 percent of the capacity, requesting interconnection from 2000 to 2017 reached commercial operations by the end of 2022, the Berkeley report found.
The Berkeley researchers collected data from interconnection queues for seven regional transmission organizations (RTOs) or independent system operators (ISOs) – which together serve about 85 percent of the country – and 35 non-ISO utilities.
The most projects waiting, 3,042, are in the PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for all or parts of 13 mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states and the District of Columbia.
The second largest share of projects, 1,879, is in the West, which does not have an ISO, followed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which operates a grid in 15 central states and the Canadian province of Manitoba, with 1,734 pending projects.
To accommodate these projects, as well as a forecasted increase in new generation, additional transmission will be needed.
A recent draft report by the U.S. Department of Energy estimates the country will need more than 47,300 gigawatt-miles of new transmission lines by 2040 – in some cases new lines will be needed as soon as 2030.
The BloombergNEF analysis released last week estimates that globally at least $21.4 trillion in transmission investments are needed by 2050 to support a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions scenario.
This includes $4.1 trillion to sustain the existing grid and $17.3 trillion to expand the grid for new electricity consumption and production.
About $1.5 trillion of that investment will be needed in the U.S., the report estimated.
The size of the grid must effectively double to accommodate more generation and new technologies such bi-direction flow and remote monitoring, Sanjeet Sanghera, head of grids and utilities at BloombergNEF, said in a statement.
“The legacy grid was built for the industrial revolution and outperformed our wildest expectations,” said Sanghera. “The technologies, policies and strategies utilities will need to accomplish this goal are different from those that made the grid so successful in the past.”
