Amid growing demand for electricity, a report released today by The Brattle Group and Grid Strategies LLC proposes reforms to generator interconnection, the process by which new, large-scale energy resources are connected to transmission grids.
The report called Unlocking America’s Energy, co-commissioned by Advanced Energy United and Solar and Storage Industries Institute and endorsed by the Clean Energy Buyers Alliance, provides recommendations to advance a new vision of the interconnection process, offering cost transparency, schedule certainty, and process efficiencies.
The report’s specific reform proposals include:
- Providing upfront cost certainty by adopting an “entry fee” to be paid by interconnecting resources that reflects the actual cost of transmission upgrades needed to accommodate the interconnection of those resources. This recommendation closely tracks the recommendation from SI2’s paper called Game Changing Interconnection Reform released this spring.
- Implementing fast-track processes to quickly utilize existing and pre-planned interconnection capacity.
- Further optimizing the interconnection study process to identify the available headroom on the system, increase study efficiency, and remove unnecessary barriers.
- Speeding up transmission project construction.
The reforms presented in the report come ahead of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)’s upcoming two-day workshop on generation interconnection. The reforms are intended to build upon the new rules FERC issued last year to power markets to improve interconnection processes.
Many thanks to the team at Grid Strategies LLC and The Brattle Group and all the other contributors.
Download the full report: https://blog.advancedenergyunited.org/reports/unlocking-americas-energy
