Understanding the transmission bottleneck

Catalyst with Shayle Kann

Editor’s note: There’s momentum behind permitting reform in the U.S. Congress right now. It could mean unstopping a serious bottleneck in climate tech — transmission. So we’re revisiting an episode from last May with Grid Strategies’ Rob Gramlich to understand how we got here, the impacts on climate tech, and the potential fixes.

The U.S. power grid is clogged, and it’s holding back the energy transition.

Solar and wind farms are waiting four or more years to connect to the grid. Rising congestion costs are driving up retail electricity prices while hurting generator revenues. And the process of approving projects for interconnection is so complicated and expensive that it’s forcing developers to abandon the projects they were planning to build.

We need much more transmission capacity and a better process for connecting projects. And we need it now more than ever. Demand for power will skyrocket as we connect EVs, heat pumps and other new loads to the grid. But Rob Gramlich, our guest today, comes with good news: We did it before. We can do it again.

Rob is the founder and president of Grid Strategies. In this episode, Shayle and Rob talk through the three major challenges of transmission – congestion, interconnection, and buildout. And Rob explains how we’ve built out transmission in the past with efforts like ERCOT’s Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ) and MISO’s Multi-Value Projects (MVPs).

They also cover topics like:

• The history of transmission buildout in the U.S.
• The three P’s of transmission challenges: planning, permitting, and paying
• How congestion costs might shoot up over the next few years as grid capacity lags behind generation, causing new generation to slow and retail electricity prices to go up
• Reforming the slow, complex, and expensive approval process for interconnection at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
• How the backed up interconnection queue leads developers to submit speculative projects, hoping for one project, but filing six to see what they get
• Where local opposition fits into transmission’s larger problems

Recommended Resources:

• Grid Strategies: Transmission Congestion Costs in the U.S. RTOs
• Grid Strategies: Fewer New Miles: The U.S. Transmission Grid in the 2010s
• E&E News: Senators line up to support permitting package

Recommended resources

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