In an effort to clear the existing backlog of solar, wind, and battery projects in need of interconnection, the Department of Energy (DOE) has created a new roadmap to accelerate some ways to get them connected to the nation’s grid. It is called the Transmission Interconnection Roadmap, and DOE hopes it will help it hit targets for interconnection improvement by 2030. To learn more about this new tool, Federal News Network’s Eric White spoke to Becca Jones-Albertus, the Director of DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.
Interview Transcript:
Eric White So why don’t we just start with an overview of what this interconnection roadmap is? And, just sort of how it all came together, and then we can kind of get into the mission of it.
Becca Jones-Albertus At the Department of Energy. We are focused on how we can enable the president’s goal of decarbonizing our electricity grid by 2035. To get there, we need to rapidly increase the amount of solar, wind, and battery storage that we are deploying. One of the barriers we need to overcome to accelerate that deployment is interconnection. Interconnection along with siting of projects, supply chain challenges. Those are some of the biggest challenges to be overcome to enable greater solar, wind and energy storage deployments. Specific to interconnection, we have seen a substantial rise in the number of projects that are submitting applications to grid operators to interconnect to the grid in recent years, and we’ve seen the backlog of those projects growing tremendously. And so while it used to take just a couple of years to get through an interconnection queue, we’re now seeing projects on average taking five years to come out of queues. We now have as much solar and energy storage in the interconnection queues as we would need to deploy over the next decade to get to our clean energy goals. But at the same time, we’re seeing that less than 20% of the projects that enter those queues are being built. So we’re seeing a problem that’s kind of exacerbating year over year where there’s more projects going into the queues, the queue slowing down, and then there’s less information about which projects will be viable at the end of that process. And so then more projects are put into the queue and we continue to exacerbate that problem. So this is a major issue that we’ve been focused on addressing at DOE. And as one of the major pillars of that work we developed this interconnection roadmap. So we have a larger effort that’s called the Interconnection Innovation Exchange or ITU acts, which is bringing together stakeholders to address the challenges related to interconnection to get to fairer, simpler and more equitable practices. And that effort has been a large stakeholder group. And one of the big pillars has been this roadmap. So over a nearly two year process since we launched the ATX program, we’ve been working to develop the roadmap, had 22 meetings with stakeholders, got feedback from more than 2000 participants on the challenges that need to be solved, pathways to solving those challenges. And the result is a roadmap that we hope can be an integrated solution set to use and its funding opportunities for industry and other stakeholder groups to use, as well in targeting their efforts to improve interconnection processes.
Eric White All right. And forgive me for making us back up even more. Interconnection of that means that the technology is there to generate power, but this is the process of actually connecting it to the power supply.
Becca Jones-Albertus The interconnection process is what the name of the process is called, where a new power plant gets permission from the grid to connect to the grid and to provide power into the grid. And so what has to happen on the grid side is that…
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