David Bromberg, vice president for power and renewables at Enverus, said he is “super proud” of his team’s work to help midcontinent grid operator MISO automate its interconnection studies.

Speaking at the Transmission and Interconnection Summit produced by Infocast, Bromberg noted progress since last year’s conference, when the panel on interconnection study automation was asked to address how automation could be accomplished. But now, he said, “it’s been proven that it can happen.”

Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner David Rosner recently praised MISO’s work to automate interconnection studies, supported by software known as SUGAR, developed by Bromberg’s team.

Bromberg candidly shared some of the challenges that MISO and his team have faced along the way, and thanked stakeholders for their generous input. There remains “much more to do” on interconnection study automation, he said, now that it has been proven feasible.

Nationwide, the interconnection study process remains one of the “key barriers” to getting generating projects connected to the grid and operational, said conference panelist Caitlin Marquis, managing director at Advanced Energy United. A total of 2.5 TW of generating capacity awaits interconnection studies —primarily solar, storage and wind projects.

Transmission planning

Following two panelists who noted that transmission constraints are a hurdle to interconnection, Andrew Martin, co-founder of Nira Energy, said that his firm is making a team of eight transmission planners “look like a team of 80 planners” when they use Nira’s purpose-built software for transmission planning.

A lot of transmission planning engineers, he said, “are spending 80% to 90% of their time” on time-consuming matters such as text files containing data from the models, “and they’re hand-holding that through various forms of software.”

“If you ever looked over the shoulder of a transmission planning engineer” at a grid operator, he said, “it’s just chaos. I know; I was one of them.”

But Nira’s software, Martin said, allows a much smaller team of engineers to “spend all of their time” applying engineering judgment, yielding a ten-fold increase in productivity.

Further progress

Bromberg said that Enverus is helping central U.S. grid operator SPP to prepare for its consolidated planning process and its modeling challenges, and may potentially help with some analysis as well.

SPP’s planning process involves a proposal to “pre-build” transmission, Marquis said, and to provide generation project developers with greater up-front transparency on interconnection costs, while also setting higher expectations for developers early in the interconnection study process.

Andrew Martin characterized SPP’s approach as combining transmission planning and generation interconnection into the same effort, saying “that’s a great trend. You need the same software stack throughout.”

Texas grid operator ERCOT took a similar approach years ago, said panel moderator and independent consultant Martin Shalhoub, adopting competitive renewable energy zones that identified in advance areas for interconnection.

The nation’s largest grid operator PJM is now working with the grid consultancy Tapestry to automate and improve the process of verifying data on interconnection applications. Tapestry General Manager Page Crahan said the vision for the project extends to a suite of tools that could “dramatically improve” the transmission planning process.