The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has introduced the nation’s inaugural roadmap aimed at expediting the connection of renewable energy sources to the national power grid, in alignment with the objective of transitioning the U.S. to 100 percent clean electricity by 2035.
A report released earlier this month by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), a government-run institution, revealed that nearly 12,000 power projects, representing 1,570 gigawatts of generation capacity, are currently seeking interconnection to the grid. Solar, wind, and storage projects collectively constitute 95 percent of the queued capacity.
According to the DOE-funded LBL report, only approximately 19 percent of projects (14 percent of capacity) requesting interconnection between 2000 and 2018 successfully commenced commercial operations by the end of 2023. Completion rates are notably lower for solar (14 percent) and battery (11 percent) projects.
The Transmission Interconnection Roadmap, as outlined by the DOE, establishes targets for project approval time, costs, and completion rates by 2030. It encompasses measures to enhance data access, transparency, and security for interconnection processes, streamline timelines, promote economic efficiency, and ensure grid reliability, resilience, and security.
Key objectives of the roadmap include reducing the average time to reach an interconnection agreement to less than 12 months, compared to 33 months in 2022, and minimizing the cost deviation of interconnection projects to less than $150 per kilowatt (kW), down from $551 per kW in 2020–21. Standardizing cost variance aims to foster greater cost certainty, thereby potentially boosting project completion rates and shortening interconnection timelines.
Additionally, the roadmap targets a 70 percent completion rate for interconnection projects entering the facility study phase, an increase from 45 percent in 2016. Late-stage withdrawals from the interconnection process are highlighted as particularly concerning due to their impact on other queued projects.
Moreover, the roadmap aims to eliminate power interruptions resulting from unexpected tripping of inverter-based resources (IBRs) by 2030, addressing accuracy issues in offline analysis of IBR models.
The roadmap initiative is led by the DOE’s Interconnection Innovation e-Xchange (i2X) program, launched in June 2022 with funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This program aims to facilitate simpler, faster, and fairer interconnection of clean energy resources while enhancing grid reliability, resiliency, and security.
In a related effort, i2X has announced a call for $10 million in assistance to develop analytical tools and approaches to expedite clean energy interconnection. Additionally, the Grid Innovation Program is offering $5 billion in funding support for innovation projects focusing on power distribution, storage, and clean energy interconnection solutions.