Power generation is fine. It’s transmission that’s the problem (reprise)

More evidence that solar (and wind) are uniquely expensive to transmit, even if they're cheap to generate

• power generation is fine. it’s transmission that the problem (reprise)

• more evidence of diseconomies of non-scale

• intermittent and distributed power sources for a grid built for “massive and steady”

• building small and local was a choice . . . an exactly wrong choice, but a choice

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Power generation is fine. It’s transmission that’s the problem (reprise)

Random Walk is still trying to understand why transmission upgrades for renewable energy specifically appears to be so expensive.

To recap:

• the energy bottleneck is not in generating power, but rather in hooking it up to the grid.

• The reason that hook-ups are so bottlenecked is related to the prohibitively high costs of upgrading the transmission lines to transport the additional power.

• But it’s not all transmission upgrades that are prohibitively expensive—it’s specifically transmission upgrades associated with renewable projects that are so costly (leading developers to eventually abandon their projects).

At least, that’s what it seems.

Why renewable transmission upgrades are so much more expensive is a bit of a mystery.

One possible reason is the intermittent nature of renewables that not only necessitate all kinds of harmonics, monitoring, contingency-planning, but also incur costs for a peak level of power that is achieved only half the time.

And that’s cost inefficient.

Another possible reason is that renewable projects tend to skew small. If a project is small, then there is less power generated to absorb the fixed costs of upgrading the transmission lines, which is again, inefficient. Same amount of dollars, but fewer kW generated, equals project costs with prohibitively high $/kW.

So, smaller projects would make the juice worth less than the squeeze.

Solar and storage projects are indeed smaller, in the main

Anyways, the always interesting Brian Potter of Construction Physics just published a look at some of the interconnection data, and, hot damn,, it’s right on point.

Wouldn’t you know it, solar and storage projects most definitely skew small:

Construction Physics

The interconnection queue is full of sub-200 MW projects, and solar and battery projects average the lowest capacities of the bunch.

Most planned projects are on the smaller side. Of the 11,000+ projects in the interconnection queue, roughly 8,000 of them will have a generation capacity of 200 megawatts or less, and the average capacity of a generation project in the queue is around 180 megawatts. But there’s significant variation by project type. Wind, gas, and offshore wind projects tend to be larger, while solar and battery projects tend to be smaller.

“Solar and battery projects tend to be smaller” indeed.

Does that solve the mystery?

No, of course not, but it does indicate in a general direction of solved.

To be fair, I’m not even sure the premise is totally correct because interpreting withdrawn interconnection applications is a dark science, but such that we accept the premise, it sure seems like the diseconomies of non-scale are a contributing factor to the backlog.

For solar, bigger is not better

But there’s more.