Publish Date: February 24, 2025
A new analysis finds that PJM’s slow and complex interconnection process prevented new energy supply from coming online, contributing to higher prices and potential retail rate hikes of up to 24% across the region. The report estimates that proactive transmission planning and interconnection reforms could have reduced consumer costs by as much as $7 billion, highlighting the urgent need for policy changes to accelerate new generation.
Topics: Wholesale Markets, Interconnection
Publish Date: August 27, 2024
The “Generator Interconnection” process has taken center stage in energy policy debates in recent years, emerging as a key barrier to bringing new, cost-effective resources online to meet growing demand, maintain reliability, and ensure affordable electricity for customers. Last year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released Order No. 2023, directing transmission providers to improve their interconnection processes, primarily by instituting a first-ready first-served cluster study process, increased readiness requirements for interconnection projects, and firm deadlines for study completion. Though Order No. 2023 set a critical foundation, more can be done to make the interconnection process as efficient and expedited as possible.
Topics: Wholesale Markets
Publish Date: February 26, 2024; Updated: March 7, 2024
Currently, over one million megawatts of generator and storage projects are actively seeking to connect to the U.S. transmission grid. The various grid interconnection processes across the nation have been slow and received criticism from a wide range of stakeholders for being dysfunctional. The 2024 Advanced Energy United Generator Interconnection Scorecard evaluates the outcomes and processes of the generator interconnection process across the seven U.S. regional grid operators (the RTOs/ISOs), finding some bright spots and room for significant improvement.
Topics: Wholesale Markets, Transmission
Publish Date: November 1, 2023
The New England grid must rapidly replace retiring resources with new generation to meet future load. However, uncertainty regarding the cost of accessing the grid and delays in interconnection hinder these efforts. The costs imposed on ratepayers by inefficiencies in the interconnection process are so significant that they threaten to prevent New England states from achieving their policy requirements.
Topics: Wholesale Markets, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire
Publish Date: October 5, 2023
Across the country, over 2,000 gigawatts of resources representing 10,000 projects are waiting for the green light to connect to the grid so they can commence construction and start operating—mostly clean resources like wind, solar, battery storage, and hybrid renewable-plus-storage projects. These projects are stuck in interconnection queues, undergoing an evaluation of reliability impacts and transmission system upgrades that must be made before they can start to deliver electricity to the grid.
Topics: Wholesale Markets
Publish Date: September 13, 2023
Interconnection – the process of studying how a project will impact the grid once it's plugged in – is a key piece of the advanced energy deployment process. However, over the last few years as deployment accelerates, the interconnection process has stalled to a near standstill – leaving many clean energy projects stuck or even cancelled. To address this increasingly difficult issue, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) began to consider reforms back in 2021, and in July of this year, they issued a ruling based on their considerations.
Topics: Wholesale Markets
Publish Date: September 26, 2022
On June 16, 2022, FERC issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) proposing changes to its regulations governing interconnection processes and agreements. The NOPR comes as interconnection delays across the country are slowing project development, with three times as many requests waiting in interconnection queues today as there were five years ago. FERC’s NOPR seeks to resolve these backlogs by proposing solutions that balance increased requirements for interconnecting generators to demonstrate commercial viability and “readiness” to stay in the interconnection queue and firmer obligations for transmission providers to complete studies on time.
“Understanding FERC’s Proposal for Relieving Interconnection Delays” summarizes the key provisions of FERC’s NOPR, describes how FERC proposes to change the responsibilities of interconnection customers and transmission providers, and highlights the challenges that FERC will need to address in a final ruling in order to break the delays and wait times that plague clean energy projects today.
Topics: State Policy, Wholesale Markets, Transmission
Updated: December 4, 2023; region-wide analysis published July 26, 2022
Topics: State Policy, Wholesale Markets, Transmission, Western RTO
Publish Date: July 6, 2022
Demand for renewable energy is growing in Indiana and across the country, with over 350 companies, over 180 cities across the U.S., and a growing number of institutions committing to power their operations with 100% clean energy. The ability to control energy costs and sources has always been a critical business priority, particularly for energy-intensive industries, organizations, and municipalities. As wind, solar and other renewable energy technologies continue to drop in price and increase in availability, renewable energy is an increasingly attractive option for companies seeking to lower costs, protect against fluctuating fuel prices, and meet their clean energy goals.
Topics: Wholesale Markets, Transmission
Publish Date: March 30, 2022
Acceleration of the clean energy transition is dramatically shifting the types of electric generation technologies used to meet electricity demand and reliably operate the grid. Rapid cost declines in advanced energy technologies like wind, solar, and energy storage are making them increasingly competitive choices for new generation additions. While there has been considerable attention devoted to determining the reliability value of these new resource types, the methods used to evaluate the resource adequacy, or capacity value, of conventional thermal generating resources (including coal, natural gas, and oil-fired power plants) have not been formally reexamined or updated in decades.
Topics: Utility, Regulatory, Wholesale Markets