US DOE Releases Strategy to Connect Renewable Energy to Grid

US DOE Releases Strategy to Connect Renewable Energy to Grid
The Transmission Interconnection Roadmap sets targets by 2030 concerning project approval time, costs and completion rates.
Image by Vadym Terelyuk via iStock

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has unveiled what it said is the country’s first-ever roadmap for fast-tracking the connection of renewable energy to the national power grid, in an effort to help achieve the goal of migrating the U.S. to 100 percent clean electricity by 2035.

Nearly 12,000 power projects representing 1,570 gigawatts of generation capacity are seeking interconnection to the grid, according to a report by the government-run Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) earlier this month. Solar, wind and storage projects account for 95 percent of the queue capacity.

“Only ~19 percent of projects (14 percent of capacity) requesting interconnection from 2000-2018 reached commercial operations by the end of 2023”, said the LBL report funded by the DOE. “Completion rates are even lower for solar (14 percent) and battery (11 percent) projects.

“The average time projects spent in queues before being built has increased markedly. The typical project built in 2023 took nearly 5 years from the interconnection request to commercial operations, compared to 3 years in 2015”.

The Transmission Interconnection Roadmap sets targets by 2030 concerning project approval time, costs and completion rates. It presents measures for “increasing data access, transparency, and security for interconnection; improving interconnection process and timeline; promoting economic efficiency in interconnection; and maintaining a reliable, resilient, and secure grid”, the DOE said in a statement.

The roadmap aims to reduce the average time it takes to reach an interconnection agreement to less than 12 months—from 33 months in 2022—using the date of the interconnection request as the reference point.

For interconnection costs, the roadmap targets to curb the cost deviation of an interconnection project to less than $150 per kilowatt (kW), from $551 per kW in 2020–21.

“Cost variance is a proxy for cost certainty”, the DOE explains in the roadmap text. “More cost certainty should, in principle, encourage higher project completion rates and shorter interconnection times”.

By standardizing deviation, the DOE hopes to lower the “cost variance for average customers rather than for outlying projects”, says the official text.

The target completion rate for interconnection projects is set at 70 percent, from 45 percent in 2016. The target only covers projects that entered the facility study phase.

“Late-stage withdrawals from the interconnection process, in particular, are problematic, given their impact on other projects in the queue”, the roadmap notes. “Completion rates for projects entering the later stage of the interconnection process, defined as projects that enter the facility study phase, have hovered around 50 percent since 2009, though in recent years these completion rates have been trending lower”.

The roadmap also aims to, by 2030, achieve zero power interruptions “involving unexpected tripping of IBRs [inverter-based resources] not identified in offline analysis due to inaccurate IBR models”.

The roadmap is an undertaking of the DOE’s Interconnection Innovation e-Xchange (i2X) program, launched June 2022 with funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The program “enables a simpler, faster, and fairer interconnection of clean energy resources all while enhancing the reliability, resiliency, and security of our electric grid”, the DOE says on its website.

Recently i2X issued a call for $10 million in assistance for the development of analytical tools and approaches to accelerate clean energy interconnection.

Meanwhile, the Grid Innovation Program has made available $5 billion in funding support for innovation projects on power distribution and storage, including clean energy interconnection solutions.

To contact the author, email jov.onsat@rigzone.com



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