You know I’ve been complaining about our failure to upgrade our infrastructure for years.  But, what you may not know is what this failure has been doing to our need to incorporate alternative energy sources into our power supply.  If you are under that (mis)conception, then you are NOT going to like the post today.

I’m not talking about little projects, either.  Consider Silicon Ranch’s proposed 3000 acres of solar panels (3 100 MW faculties)  in Virginia and Kentucky- with other developers having planned (and stymied) projects in Massachusetts and Maine.  Or, the wind farms that can’t be erected in North Dakota or Minnesota.  It’s these issues that may mean the $ 370 million that was part of our infrastructure bill to promote these technologies may go nowhere.

There’s supposed to be a process for this, the connecting of  projects to our electric grid systems.  However, that entire process  seems to have more stops than starts.  The operators of our transmission systems (ISO [Independent System Operators], RTO [Regional Transmission Organization], and or utilities demand impact studies be produced and evaluated.  We developed these operator systems in late 1999 under the aegis of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to promote improvements to our infrastrucure.

There are nine ISO in the USA and nine (or 11) RTO in the USA.  It’s the sheer volume of projects that is overwhelming the operators, though.

Consider the largest regional operator- PJM.  It’s trying to analyze the connection of some 2700 new projects.  (That volume was only about 900 back in 2000.)  Hence, the PJM Interconnection is so backlogged that it has frozen all new connection requests until 2026!

The issue is that the ISO/RTO need to ensure that the grid won’t be dealing with more electricity than it can handle.  If that happens, we know the power lines will overheat and fail.  So, these  operators may demand that the alternative energy developer upgrade the connection source, which can greatly increase the project costs.

(An example:  EDP North America’s Minnesota facility, a 100 MW Wind Farm, expected to drop $ 10 million to connect to the transmission grid.  But the grid operator demanded vaster upgrades, raising the costs by $ 80 Million- high enough to cause the cancelation of the project.   And, that creates yet another set of problems- the operator then has to reanalyze all the other connecting projects, shifting costs to them- which creates delays for those new facilities.)

And given this system, it shouldn’t be surprising that it takes about four years from start to finish to get approval for a connection- or roughly twice as long as it took a decade ago.  (Plus, there’s another hurdle- the grid is typically at capacity, so it costs way more to add those transmission lines and other upgrades to the system.) Which may explain why only 20% of the proposed systems actually get connected to our grid.  (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that there are 1300 GW of power awaiting entry into our transmission grid.)

Could you imaging our highway system operating in such a fashion? We would be demanding that a car trying to get on the road that is already backed up with traffic congestion be required to build a new lane to use the highway.  And, that car has to pay for that construction itself.  After that,  every new car thereafter gets to use that new road for free!

We should make the transmission operators fully analyze their existing systems and develop uniform and rational cost guides by which all the new projects can connect.  (Just so you know, FERC had proposed two major reforms for interconnections, as seen above.  But the administrator, Richard Glick, resigned late last year after a tiff with Senator Joe Manchin. So, who knows where these proposed regulation will go.)