Why Thousands of Clean Energy Projects Wait Years to Connect to the Grid

On July 27, 2023, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a five-member agency most Americans have never heard of, issued a rule numbered Order No. 2023. It is very long, and nothing in it presents climate change as its purpose. It is about paperwork: how a company that wants to plug a new power plant into the electric grid asks permission, how the grid operator studies the request, who pays for the wires that need upgrading, and how long all of that should take. It may be one of the most important clean energy policies of the decade. At the time it was issued, the queues of projects waiting to connect to the American grid held more generating capacity than the entire country's existing fleet of power plants, most of it solar, wind and batteries. Many of those projects would wait years for an answer. Most would never be built at all. The reason is not that anyone is against them. It is that the system for letting them in was designed for a different century.

In short: Before a new power plant can sell electricity, it must go through an interconnection study run by the regional grid operator, which can take years and end with a bill for grid upgrades the project cannot afford. FERC's 2023 order tried to speed this up with group studies, stricter entry requirements and deadlines. It helps, but the deeper fix is building more transmission lines.

What a queue actually is

Picture a developer who has found a good site for a solar farm in Indiana: flat, sunny, near a highway and a high-voltage line. She has signed leases with the farmers who own the land. She has a buyer lined up for the power. Before she can build, she must get permission to connect to the grid.

That means submitting an interconnection request to the regional grid operator, an organization like PJM in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest or MISO in the central states, or to the local utility in parts of the country without one. The request goes into a queue. Engineers then study what would happen to the grid if her plant were added. Would any lines overload on a hot afternoon? Would voltages swing outside safe limits? Would a fault somewhere else cause problems? If the answer to any of those is yes, the study identifies network upgrades, new transformers, stronger lines, new substation equipment, needed to fix the problem.

In much of the country, the developer who triggers the need for an upgrade is assigned much of its cost. That approach, often called participant funding, sounds fair. It works badly when hundreds of projects are trying to connect to the same congested part of the grid.

How the old system broke

For decades, the rules governing this process, set largely by an earlier FERC order in 2003, assumed a world of a few large power plants, mostly fossil fuel, connecting occasionally. Requests were studied one at a time, in the order they arrived: first come, first served.

Then the economics of clean energy changed. Solar and wind got cheap, battery storage arrived, and states set clean energy targets. Suddenly thousands of developers, many of them small, were submitting requests. Because it cost relatively little to get into the queue, many developers submitted speculative requests for multiple sites, hoping one would work out. That flooded the queues with projects that were never likely to be built.

Serial studies broke down under that load. Each project's study depended on the projects ahead of it. When one project dropped out, the projects behind it often had to be restudied, because the grid upgrades it would have paid for were no longer coming. A developer could get an estimate, plan around it, and then see it change completely because someone else withdrew. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who track the queues every year, found that the typical time from requesting interconnection to starting commercial operation had grown to around five years for recently completed projects, far longer than it had been in the 2000s. And most projects that entered the queue were eventually withdrawn.

The upgrade bills also grew. When the cheap, easy connection points were used up, the next project often triggered the need for a major upgrade. A single solar farm might be told it was responsible for tens of millions of dollars in improvements that would also benefit everyone who came after it. Many withdrew rather than pay. Then the next project in line got the bill.

What Order 2023 changed

FERC's 2023 order tried to fix the process at several points.

1. Cluster studies. Instead of studying projects one at a time, grid operators must study them in groups, or clusters, which lets engineers evaluate the combined effect of many projects at once and divide the cost of shared upgrades among them.
2. First-ready, first-served. To discourage speculative requests, developers must show they are serious before entering the queue. That means demonstrating control over the land for the project and posting deposits that grow as the project moves forward.
3. Withdrawal penalties. Developers who drop out late in the process face financial penalties, which discourages the cascading restudies that used to plague the queues.
4. Firm deadlines for grid operators. Transmission providers must complete studies on a set schedule, and if they miss the deadlines without good cause, they face penalties.
5. New technologies. Grid operators must consider whether advanced technologies, such as equipment that lets existing lines carry more power, could solve problems more cheaply than building new infrastructure.

Grid operators had to file plans to comply, and several were already moving toward cluster studies on their own before the order was issued. PJM, the largest grid operator in the country, paused new requests for a time while it worked through a large backlog under its reformed process, a decision that helped clear old projects but also kept new ones waiting.

The argument about who pays

There is a real debate underneath the queue problem, and both sides have a point.

On one side are utilities, some state regulators and grid operators who argue that the project causing the need for an upgrade should pay for it. If everyone shared the cost, they say, ordinary ratepayers would end up paying for the grid upgrades that let private developers profit, including developers whose power might be sold to customers in other states. That is a fair concern about who bears the bill.

On the other side are clean energy developers and many economists who argue that the grid is a shared system, and that a large upgrade triggered by one project benefits everyone who uses the grid afterward: other generators, and the customers who get cheaper, cleaner power. Charging the whole bill to whoever happens to arrive at the wrong moment is arbitrary and discourages exactly the investment the country needs.

The better answer, I think, is to stop treating major grid expansion as the byproduct of individual project requests. If grid operators plan new transmission lines ahead of time, based on where power will be needed and where it can be cheaply generated, then projects can connect to a grid that is ready for them. FERC took a step in that direction in 2024 with Order No. 1920, which requires grid operators to plan for regional transmission needs twenty years out. That rule faces legal challenges and will take years to show results.

Squeezing more out of the wires we have

Building new transmission lines takes a decade or more. While that slow work goes on, there are faster ways to get more power through the grid that already exists, and they have been oddly neglected.

One is to measure what lines can really carry. Utilities have traditionally rated a power line's capacity using conservative assumptions about the weather, as if every day were hot and still. On a cool, windy day, the same line can safely carry considerably more electricity, because the wind cools it. Sensors and software that rate lines according to actual conditions, known as dynamic line ratings, can unlock that extra room. FERC has required grid operators to at least adjust ratings for air temperature, and has looked at going further.

Another is reconductoring: replacing the old wires on existing towers with modern conductors that carry more current without sagging dangerously. Because the towers and rights of way are already there, the work can avoid many of the permitting fights that block new lines.

A third is reusing connection points that already exist. When a coal plant retires, it leaves behind a valuable asset: a connection to the high-voltage grid sized for a large power plant. Several grid operators have adopted rules letting new projects, often solar farms or batteries, take over those connections faster than they could get a new one. Rules on what is called surplus interconnection also let a battery or solar array be added to an existing plant's connection without starting from scratch.

None of these tools replaces new transmission. Together they can buy time, and they share one appealing feature: utilities can often do them for a fraction of the cost of a new line. The obstacle is frequently that utilities earn more from building big new things than from making old things work better, which is a regulatory problem state commissions can fix.

Where Texas is different

The Texas grid, run by ERCOT, connects projects faster than most of the rest of the country. Part of the reason is an approach often called connect and manage: rather than requiring every possible upgrade before a project connects, ERCOT lets it connect and then manages congestion by limiting its output when the grid is stressed. Developers accept the risk of being curtailed in exchange for getting online sooner. Texas also built a major set of transmission lines in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, to carry wind power from West Texas to the cities.

The result is that Texas has added wind, solar and batteries at a pace few other places match. The Texas model has costs. Its grid is mostly isolated from the rest of the country, which contributed to the disaster during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, when millions of people lost power and hundreds died. But on the narrow question of getting clean power connected, a state with little interest in climate policy has outperformed most blue states. That should make progressives ask what they can learn from it.

Why this is a progressive issue

It is easy to treat interconnection queues as a technical problem for engineers and lawyers. It is more than that.

The projects waiting in line are, in large part, the clean energy that states have promised in their climate laws. A state can pass a law requiring 100 percent clean electricity, but if the solar farms that would supply it sit in a queue for five years, the law is a promise without a plan.

The queues also affect electricity bills. As data centers, factories and electrification push demand up, the grid needs new power. If the cheapest new sources cannot connect, utilities lean harder on existing plants, often older gas and coal plants, and prices rise. In parts of the PJM region, the prices paid to guarantee future power supply jumped sharply in recent auctions, and those costs flow into household bills. Faster interconnection is an affordability policy.

And this is a place where progressives sometimes get in their own way. Many of the barriers to new transmission lines come from local opposition and lengthy reviews that progressive-leaning states and communities have defended. A movement that wants rapid clean energy deployment has to be willing to build things, including big power lines through places that would rather not have them, while treating the people in those places fairly. The Grain Belt Express, a line proposed around 2010 to carry Kansas wind east, is still not built, and its story shows how long that fight can take.

What you can do

Interconnection decisions happen in obscure places, but they are public, and a few informed voices go a long way.

• Watch the clean power numbers in your state. The climate data page shows the US power mix and clean power by state, a rough measure of how well your state is getting new projects online.
• Comment on federal energy rules. FERC and the Energy Department take public comment on many grid rules. The comment page lists federal rules open for comment now, grouped by issue, with how to write one.
• Ask your state lawmakers about transmission. State legislatures and utility commissions decide much of the siting for new power lines. Find your state legislators and members of Congress and ask what they are doing to get lines built.
• Learn the broader fight. The climate policy page follows coverage of permitting, transmission and the grid from across the spectrum.

The developer in Indiana with her signed leases and her waiting buyer is not an abstraction. Thousands like her are waiting right now, and behind each of them are farmers counting on lease payments, electricians counting on work and customers counting on cheaper power. Getting them connected is not glamorous. It is one of the most useful things a climate movement can fight for.