Dive Brief:
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The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would be required to issue regulations within 18 months to give generating and storage resources faster and more cost-effective access to the grid under legislation introduced Thursday by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., and shared exclusively with Utility Dive.
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The bill builds on FERC’s recent reform requirements, in part by requiring transmission providers to use modeling assumptions for each resource type, such as solar and storage, based on actual operating abilities and practices when studying interconnection requests.
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The bill would help bring new power supply online to address surging demand growth and increasing grid reliability concerns, according to Devin Hartman, director of energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute, which supports the legislation. “This issue is really important for any type of power plant development in our future — whether that's the distributed energy revolution or the nuclear renaissance — interconnection needs to get better because we have got to get more steel in the ground and online,” he said.
Dive Insight:
The U.S. interconnection backlog jumped 27% in 2023 over 2022, to 2.6 TW, as projects are moving more slowly through interconnection queues, according to a report released earlier this month by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“There are new energy projects being developed all over the country and we need to make sure they can get online as quickly as possible,” Cortez Masto said in a press release. “By speeding up the slow and outdated process of connecting new projects to the grid, [the] legislation will lower energy costs for Nevada families and make our grids more reliable.”
Castor said that “across the United States, new energy projects are stalled, waiting in long lines to interconnect to the grid. The bill “would make commonsense reforms to the outdated, sluggish interconnection process and enable new energy generation to come online, faster. More energy generation on the grid means lower prices for consumers and more reliability throughout the electricity system,” she added.
Generator interconnection is the biggest barrier to new power plant development in the country in many regions, even more than permitting hurdles, according to Hartman.
The legislation by Cortez Masto and Castor directs FERC to start moving on potential reforms. It orders FERC to require transmission providers to study interconnection requests in “a manner consistent with the risk tolerance of the interconnection customer.”
This provision would open a pathway for generators to connect to the grid as “energy-only” resources, according to Hartman. Those resources would face potential curtailment and would not be considered “capacity,” but wouldn’t have to pay for network upgrades, he said.
FERC would also have to require transmission providers to share and adopt queue management best practices, such as using advanced computing technologies, automation and standardized study criteria to speed interconnection review process.
In addition, FERC would have to order transmission providers to adopt transparency and performance-enhancing measures to ensure that needed network upgrades are built on time and as cost-effectively as possible once an interconnection agreement has been signed.
The legislation is supported by 20 organizations, including the Electricity Consumers Resource Council, Electricity Customer Alliance and Industrial Energy Consumers of America.
The bill will likely gain Republican co-sponsors, according to Hartman. “Permitting and generator interconnection are among the biggest concerns to keeping a grid reliable over the next decade, and reliability and cost considerations are the top two Republican energy priorities,” he said.
The legislation could become part of a broader permitting reform package, and at the least carry over into the next Congressional session, according to Hartman. It could also send a signal to FERC that additional interconnection reforms are needed, he said.
The Department of Energy on Wednesday issued a transmission interconnection road map aimed at improving processes that will allow generators to connect to the grid more quickly and efficiently. It recommends various interconnection measures that go beyond those found in FERC’s interconnection reform rules.
And when FERC updated its interconnection requirements in July, Commissioner Allison Clements outlined areas ripe for additional reform.
Editor’s Note: We’ve updated this story with comments from Rep. Castor.
