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Utilities do charge infrastructure projects for their interconnection costs. Maybe there was some hypothetical situation where some costs would have gone into a general budget, but utilities aren’t usually in the habit of doing large interconnection projects for free and sending the bills to consumers.

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So the interconnect costs cover the infrastructure buildout to generate the additional power demands, or that’s spread across all consumers in perpetuity? Because the interconnect itself is the cheap part afaik. And all of our rates go up to cover the costs of the additional generation whether it’s another solar farm or another ng plant.

They don’t generally just have GW of power sitting idle for a rainy day (I’m not talking about the capacity they reserve for hot july days).

Most of the increase seen in utility costs is for transmission, not generation. Generation is an important piece, but it's not the only piece.

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