The message from the Tuesday launch of the Department of Energy’s Interconnection Innovation eXchange (I2X) initiative was clear: To reach President Biden’s goal of a U.S. electricity system powered 100% by clean power by 2035, interconnecting solar, wind and other clean energy projects to the grid must be made simpler, faster and fairer.

The latest figures from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) show that more than 1,400 GW of mostly zero-carbon generation and storage projects are sitting in transmission interconnection queues across the country, with solar making up about half the total.

“This is mind-blowing to me,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in opening remarks at the virtual launch. “That 1,400 GW is about what we need to reach a critical milestone of 80% clean electricity by 2030. If we could get all that capacity online, imagine how much faster we could reach our climate goals.”

Granholm acknowledged the challenges ahead are complex, if not daunting. LBNL also found that interconnection wait times are trending up, while project completion rates are falling. From 2000 to 2016, completion rates sat at 20% for solar projects and 16% for wind projects. In 2021, wait times had climbed to 3.7 years, up from 2.1 years a decade earlier.

Further, according to Alejandro Moreno, DOE deputy assistant secretary for renewable power, the time and cost of interconnection processes “tend to favor incumbents who have the resources and know-how to add new generation to the grid. [But they] can disadvantage new generation, particularly community-scale generation,” he said.

“Because [these] projects tend to be smaller in scale, they’re more sensitive to cost and become quickly too expensive to build,” Moreno said.

Funded with $3 million from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, I2X hopes to untangle such issues by pulling in a broad range of stakeholders, setting up collaborative working groups, collecting and analyzing massive amounts of data and developing a five-year interconnection roadmap, Granholm said. The initiative will look at both transmission- and distribution-level interconnection.

About 200 companies and organizations have already signed up to participate, including CAISO, PJM, SPP and NERC, as well as major utilities such as National Grid, Xcel Energy and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

With stakeholder engagement a core pillar of the initiative, Naomi Davis, founder and CEO of Chicago nonprofit Blacks in Green, said a commitment to ensuring communities are at the table will be essential. The need is real, she said, “but the practice requires a budget line item, and it requires metrics, concrete metrics for achieving equitable, meaningful engagement.”

Speaking on the first of two stakeholder panels at the launch, Davis pointed to weatherization as a “threshold issue” for communities of color. “We have many seniors, homeowners who are entitled … to have the comfort, the security, the reliability of the new renewable energy that everyone is so excited about but which too few of our homes in the Black and brown community are prepared to receive. The deferred maintenance issue must be addressed,” she said.

Danielle Sass Byrnett, director of the Center for Partnerships and Innovation at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, spoke of the intensive stakeholder engagement processes now underway in several states as they roll out interconnection standards under IEEE 1547-2108. Implementing the standards for interconnecting distributed energy resources has taken multiple years of “learning about the standard, understanding the implications of different decision-making within the standard … and looking at the processes and speed of interconnection once you have the new standards in place,” Byrnett said.

To help utilities and DER developers navigate the new rules, some states are experimenting with “interconnection ombudsmen or adjudicators,” she said.

Models Don’t Match Reality

Beyond simpler, faster and fairer, I2X has some ambitious goals, according to Tom McDermott, solar subsector manager at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, one of three National Laboratories working on the initiative with DOE. The other two are LBNL and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

By the end of the year, I2X will have defined and simulated interconnection process improvements, McDermott said. The first draft of the roadmap and an accompanying interconnection studies guide geared toward engineers are due March 31, 2023.

“We also need to define achievable metrics for improvement over the five-year horizon, for example to reduce the cost and time of interconnection by 50%,” he said. “The right number may vary by state, region or operating entity.”

The roadmap will include separate sections for the bulk power and distribution systems and for large- and small-scale generation, McDermott said. “There may be different approaches for regulated and unregulated jurisdictions … and finally the roadmap will suggest mitigations for any costs, delays or uncertainties encountered in the transition from existing practice to a better set of practices.”

Drilling into key interconnection issues on the second stakeholder panel, Ryan Quint, a senior manager at NERC, argued for I2X to have a strong focus on reliability.

“The current interconnection requirements and interconnection study processes are not equipped to handle the new resource base” of renewable energy, Quint said. “Some of the issues include component modifications and rework throughout the process, which adds complexity and slows down the process.”

“We end up with models that are used in reliability studies … and these models don’t match reality” and can ultimately create “a huge liability risk,” he said.

“We need to recognize that reliability and speed of interconnection don’t have to be conflicting objectives here,” Quint said. “We need to develop measures of success that assess the root cause issues we face, not the symptoms.”

For example, instead of measuring project dropout rates, Quint said, researchers should be looking at the number of studies “that are necessary because equipment changes were made at the last minute” or the disparities between interconnection requirements and processes.

Automation is Coming

Charlie Smith, executive director of Energy Systems Integration Group, boiled the metrics down to three main benchmarks. For faster interconnection, he wants the time from application to interconnection agreement cut to “two years or even months.” To measure fairness, he said, the question will be, “[Are] our developers being saddled with unreasonable network upgrade costs, yes or no?”

To make the process simpler, he called for “a publicly transparent generator connection study process that allows developers to do their own analysis and have a sense of cost before submitting their project in order to reduce speculative projects.”

Smith also pointed to “connect and manage”  interconnection practices in Ireland, the U.K. and Germany. In these countries, he said, generation projects may be allowed to connect to a transmission system before completion of a wider set of system upgrades.

Brian Fitzsimons, CEO of GridUnity, sees interconnection as “a large, integrated data capture, data sharing and analysis problem that needs to be brought into the real-time, information-sharing world.” He talked up his company’s cloud platform for aggregating and validating data and automating engineering analysis.

“Automation of engineering analysis will reduce study times and can be applied to reduce the number of stages in the process and the number of complex decision points,” he said. “As study cost and time come down, there won’t be as much need for multiple go-no-go points in the interconnection process.”