"As of the end of 2022, a staggering 10,000 projects representing over 2,000 GW of potential generation and storage capacity are stuck in line to connect to the grid. That is nearly double the 1,250 GW of total installed capacity in the United States today. Wait times have “increased markedly,” with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab reporting that “[t]he typical project built in 2022 took 5 years from the interconnection request to commercial operations, compared to 3 years in 2015 and [less than] 2 years in 2008.” Meanwhile, interconnection costs have increased significantly. Project completion rates are very low, and late-stage withdrawal is becoming more common. In addition, the typical timespan between the execution of a project’s interconnection agreement and its commercial operations date has also increased, from roughly 17 months for projects built between 2007-2014 to around 22 months for projects built between 2015-2022."

The process to implement these interconnection reforms, and to see tangible results, will take time and, in our view, it may be several years before we see meaningful progress in shrinking the interconnection backlog

lack of close coordination between the interconnection request process and the transmission planning process.

The three GETs are: Advanced Power Flow Control, which "injects voltage in series with a facility to increase or decrease effective reactance, thereby pushing power off overloaded facilities or pulling power on to underutilised facilities," Dynamic Line Ratings (DLR), which "adjusts thermal ratings based on actual weather conditions including, at a minimum, ambient temperature and wind, in conjunction with real-time monitoring of resulting line behavior," and Topology Optimisation which "automatically finds reconfiguration to re-route flow around congested or overloaded facilities while meeting reliability criteria."

The payback period for the US$90mn cost of these GETs in the SPP power grid is around half a year – a very attractive return on investment. GETs would allow for >2x growth in renewables deployment in the SPP without significant transmission upgrades.