The U.S. Has Billions for Wind and Solar Projects. Good Luck Plugging Them In. (yahoo.com)
PJM Interconnection, which operates the nation’s largest regional grid, stretching from Illinois to New Jersey, has been so inundated by connection requests that last year it announced a freeze on new applications until 2026 so that it can work through a backlog of thousands of proposals, mostly for renewable energy.
It now takes roughly four years, on average, for developers to get approval, double the time it took a decade ago.
And when companies finally get their projects reviewed, they often face another hurdle: The local grid is at capacity, and they are required to spend much more than they planned for new transmission lines and other upgrades.
Many give up. Fewer than one-fifth of solar and wind proposals actually make it through the so-called interconnection queue, according to research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.