LANSING – Nationwide and in Michigan, clean power development has exploded, driven by renewables becoming cheaper, governments setting climate goals and power demand rising after years of stagnation, while old coal power plants shut down.
But the rush has clogged the system of getting permission to plug into the grid, leaving all sorts of power installations waiting up to five years before being built. Many never are, and experts say the logjam is bad for power bills, reliability and the climate.
More than 1,600 energy projects – the lion’s share solar farms and other low-carbon installations – are lined up to juice the regional grid serving the Midwest and central U.S. Some 240 are in Michigan, according to a grid database.
But as many as four in five projects are canceled before they reach the front of the line, per research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Those that do can face outsized connection costs that leave projects financially dead in the water, developers say.
Plugging into the grid not as easy as it sounds
Why can’t new power plants juice the grid as soon as they’re built?
“You have to do a study to make sure nothing’s going to blow up basically, no lines are going to overload,” said Rhonda Peters, a technical consultant with Clean Grid Alliance and an expert in that process, known as “interconnection.”
When a power project is proposed, a series of sophisticated engineering studies ensure lines and transformers can handle the new infusion.
They cast a wide net, covering thousands of miles.
A study of a power injection in Michigan will examine the effects on the grid across the entire eastern U.S. and Canada, said Douglas Jester, managing partner at 5 Lakes Energy, a Michigan-based energy consulting firm.
The process was more straightforward when the regional grid was adding a few big power plants, like facilities that burn coal or natural gas, every year.
But as renewable energy has gotten cheaper and billions in federal dollars have flowed to wind and solar projects, they have stacked up by the thousands in “interconnection queues” waiting to undergo studies.
Most of Michigan falls under the jurisdiction of a grid operator called the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, covering 15 states and parts of Canada.
Its queue has more than 300 gigawatts of projects in it, nearly quadruple what it was five years ago and including some 40 gigawatts in Michigan, per a MISO database. For context, the record peak electric demand for the entire 15-state system is about 127 gigawatts.
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