Aided by the Inflation Reduction Act, the momentum behind wind and solar continues to grow. The problem is that it has become a situation of hurry up and wait.
As of December 2023, there were 2.6 terawatts of projects sitting in interconnection queues throughout the country. According to Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory almost all of it – 95.4% to be exact – is clean energy.
Just how much have the interconnection queues grown?
In 2010 the total of all forms of energy in the queue was 463 gigawatts (GW). By 2023 that total grew four-fold to 2,598 GW. Given that in 2010 there wasn’t much renewable energy activity, the clean energy queue numbers have understandably grown exponentially, from 39 GW of wind to a combined 2,480 GW of wind, solar and storage.
From 2010, the backlog for wind increased almost 10-fold to 366 GW. The current solar backlog is 1,086 GW and storage accounts for 1,028 GW. Take away renewables and the total backlog actually declined from 2010 from 649 GW to just 118 GW of non-clean energy – mostly natural gas.
To put this in perspective, the 2.6 terawatts in the interconnection queues is double the capacity of the entire U.S. electric grid.
How did this happen?
There are a multitude of reasons including poor planning with respect to the interconnection process, a lack of qualified staff to review applications, and the architecture of the grid itself. These were all quite foreseeable, but no one bothered to look. They were too busy patting themselves on the back for igniting the renewable energy movement.
Steps are being taken to streamline and improve the process, but the reform process itself is woefully slow, and at the end of the day, likely inadequate in its present form. Given this, don’t expect the problem to diminish any time soon, causing a sustained headwind to our net-zero energy goals.
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