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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

TLDR more batteries (to firm renewables), renewables (to overproduce), and streamline ISO interconnect processes

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/grid-interconnection-queue-...

> The total capacity of energy projects in U.S. interconnection queues grew 40% year-over-year in 2022, with more than 1,350 GW of generation and 680 GW of storage waiting for approval to connect, according to a new report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/queued_up_2022_04-06...

https://electrek.co/2023/04/19/tesla-reports-massive-increas...

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While listening to a recent NPR podcast about green energy, the claimed that there were projects proposed for green energy that in sum would be larger than todays complete US generation from all sources.

The main problems are around interconnect and upgrading infrastructure. Lines and transformers are built to a certain capacity and connecting all these new projects could cause failures and blackouts. BEFORE you can even get approved, there has (historically) been a multi-year study required to validate everything. They are now doing them in groups of projects of 50 or more. However, then the estimates are for what would be needed for ALL 50 projects which is clearly overkill as they won't all pan out.

There is money in the Inflation Reduction Act to help upgrade the infrastructure and expedite the process but it is a trickle when we need more. The other approach is to just hook things up and wait until something breaks. Then the supplier would have to limit their capacity until they paid for increased carrying capacity. All said, this seems to indicate that infrastructure is the main bottleneck.

From my quick skim of the site, it was unclear to me the timing of the queue. Do projects sit in there for 90 days or three years before approval?

Once approved, the project still has to be built, correct? Is there a resource that lists plants which are actively expanding? That seems like a more useful short term metric to understand new capacity, because items in the queue may never be constructed.

It's both, a small project with grid capacity nearby can be approved quickly but larger projects without nearby capacity can take years to get resolved.

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