Regional planning and cost allocation in the US Great Plains, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic are failing to prepare the grid for an era when huge amounts of low-cost renewable energy will be the main source of power generation, a new study warned.

Instead, the focus of three regional transmission organisations (RTOs) reviewed by the study has been on developing solutions to meet the current, not future, reliability and economic needs of the system.

“America’s transmission system is in need of a 21st century makeover if we’re going to have any shot at achieving the level of renewable deployment necessary to address our climate challenge,” said Greg Wetstone, CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy (Acore).

President Joe Biden has set a goal for the US to achieve a carbon-free electric grid by 2035 which will require trillions of dollars investment in new renewable energy generation capacity and heavy duty, long-haul transmission upgrades.

Acore in coordination with two other national trade groups, American Clean Power Association and the Solar Energy Industries Association, commissioned advisory firm Concentric Energy Advisors to investigate the extent to which those planning processes inhibit development of cost-competitive renewables in grids managed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), PJM Interconnection and Southwest Power Pool.

The effects of lack of transmission planning for the future generation resource mix is “plainly visible” in the generator interconnection (IC) queues where prospective wind and solar generators are confronted with extremely high network upgrade costs to tie into the transmission system, the study said. That single project cost can be hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases.

At the end of 2019, there were 734GW of proposed generators waiting in IC queues nationwide, almost 90% of which were renewable and storage resources, according to How Transmission Planning and Cost Allocation Processes are Inhibiting Wind & Solar Development in SPP, MISO, & PJM.

“High network upgrade costs and cost uncertainty in the generator interconnection queues have resulted in bottlenecks and significant delays (in some cases as long as 4 years) that have prevented hundreds of renewable energy projects from reaching commercial operation” said the report.

It highlighted that the present cost allocation practice for interconnecting wind and solar projects in the three RTOs in that generators are considered to be the “cost causers” and bear most, if not all, of the network upgrade costs even if other transmission customers or load may benefit from the improvement.

“Our interview subjects were nearly unanimous in expressing the view that more centrally coordinated regional planning, and improved interregional planning, would help identify and implement transmission solutions that allow more low-cost renewable resources to come online,” said Julie Lieberman, senior project manager at Concentric and lead author of the report.

The report also concluded that reasonable expectations of renewable resource expansion should be integrated into “futures” assumptions in transmission planning studies. This should include reasonable forecasts for future storage, renewables, and gas generation additions, as well as fossil fuel plant retirements.

Among the other conclusions were that planning models and / or processes should better reflect the expected real-time operations and economic dispatch of generation resources, and benefit metrics used to assess the comparable benefit of projects relative to their costs should be expanded and standardised across regions to the extent possible.

Energy Transition

America's power grid 'needs 21st century makeover' or Biden's green plans will fail