Rep. Troy Balderson plans to introduce a bill today that would require U.S. energy regulators to expedite power plant projects that are stuck in a power grid black hole.
Why it matters: Grid authorities have seen a surge in proposed power projects as developers seek sites for renewable energy.
- Roughly 2,600 gigawatts of project proposals — more than twice the power capacity currently supplying the grid — were in the interconnection queue at the end of 2023, DOE estimates. About 95% of projects in the queue were solar, wind and battery storage.
- Wait times ballooned to a median of five years in 2023, up from less than two years from 2000 to 2007.
Driving the news: Rising power demand driven by data centers and manufacturing and electrified transportation creates a demand for "dispatchable" power, Balderson, a Republican, told Axios.
- His district in southeastern Ohio is home to massive new developments: an Intel chip manufacturing plant, Google data centers and an Amgen pharmaceutical facility.
- "We want to make sure that we have the availability of power — of reliable power — to make sure that we can keep these places' lights on and machines running," Balderson said.
The intrigue: Balderson's bill fleshes out the position of congressional Republicans to back fossil fuels and nuclear as a way to supply rising demand.
- Balderson defined the type of plants that provide "dispatchable" power: natural gas, nuclear, coal.
- He hopes to develop support for the legislation to come up in the next Congress.
Reality check: Gas-fired projects represent just 3% of the current queue, and coal and nuclear projects are virtually nonexistent, DOE found.
Renewable proponents had reservations about picking plants to jump to the front of the line.
- "There's not one clear way to prioritize" projects, Elise Caplan, vice president of regulatory affairs at ACORE, declining to comment on the bill because it wasn't public yet.
- "I would emphasize there are a lot of ways to holistically improve the process," including tying the interconnection process to transmission planning. "Instead of starting on the back end and trying to prioritize, you start on the front end."
Flashback: FERC finalized a rule last year that imposed penalties on developers for withdrawing projects and on transmission providers for not meeting certain deadlines.
Our thought bubble: The devil will be in the details of how FERC would evaluate projects that are needed for grid reliability.
- And expect developers of renewable projects — particularly those with batteries — to protest the idea of getting skipped in line by a gas plant.
