PV Magazine reports on the election results from Virginia and New Jersey, with a specific focus on unlocking new clean energy opportunities by making better use of existing interconnection capacity. United’s Virginia Director Jim Purekal emphasized that Virginia must make the most of existing energy resources to meet rising load growth, while United’s New Jersey Policy Lead Katie Mettle highlighted the need for siting and permitting reforms to get more projects online faster.
New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill aims to “cut through permitting roadblocks” and interconnection delays to “get solar projects” in the state “done now,” she said during her election campaign. “We don’t have enough in-state generation to keep costs low and we risk missing our clean power targets,” she said.
Virginia Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger spoke in her campaign of “exploring opportunities” for surplus interconnection, a strategy for using points of interconnection that are currently used part-time, among other approaches to expand solar and storage in the state.
Advanced Energy United plans to promote surplus interconnection in Virginia, said Jim Purekal, United Director, speaking on a United press conference. He noted that some existing generators in Virginia are “only operating at about a third of their capacity,” and called for enabling solar, wind or storage to connect to the transmission grid at those locations.
Two University of California researchers found that surplus interconnection could fast-track 102 GW of solar across the PJM grid region, which includes Virginia, “bypassing” PJM’s “congested” interconnection queues.
Other grid operators in the U.S. are already implementing surplus interconnection, Purekal said, “and we want to implement it correctly in Virginia. We’re relying on Governor Spanberger to help us get there.”
He explained that PJM recently began allowing surplus interconnection, under new rules approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
“We’re going to be running legislation” in Virginia next year “that will try to push Dominion,” the state’s largest utility, “to look at surplus interconnection as a valuable resource,” he said.
In New Jersey, United will focus on the issue of permitting. Katie Mettle, a United Principal, said New Jersey’s governor has the power to direct the Department of Environmental Protection and the Board of Public Utilities “to fast-track siting and permitting, to open up additional areas to solar development, and to streamline or redesign existing programs to eliminate delays and to maximize the number of projects that can benefit.”
Read the full article here.