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Novele is aiming to smooth out power consumption for commercial buildings, saving tenants money and easing grid strain.
Oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway, seem to be returning to normal.
A new dashboard from the Sustainable AI Group, founded by artificial intelligence alums, estimates the relative energy intensity of proprietary tools.
By neutering the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, the Trump administration cements the country’s dependence on oil and liquid fuels.
The renewables developer is expanding its business to serve “our nation’s growing energy needs.”
A new study from energy company Foundry-Logic argues that simply replacing old solar panels could add significant new capacity to the grid.
All across the United States, solar panels are withering on the vine. Equipment installed 10 to 15 years ago is still capturing sunlight and pumping out electricity, but significantly less of it than when the cells were new.
This is not a story about decline, however, but about growth. America’s aging solar farms represent an opportunity to expand clean energy capacity without using more land — and potentially without having to wait years for new projects to get through the grid’s interconnection queue.
Modern panels can produce as much as 70% more energy than new ones sold 20 years ago, according to Wood Mackenzie. A report published Monday estimates that “repowering” existing solar farms, or replacing old panels with new ones, could unlock about 9.6 gigawatts of solar power by 2030, 29 gigawatts by 2035, and 67 gigawatts by 2040. (For comparison, the U.S. added 27.2 gigawatts of utility-scale solar last year.) If every project up for repowering between now and 2040 installed batteries, as well, that would add up to 13 additional gigawatts of storage to the grid by 2030, and nearly 92 gigawatts by 2040. The U.S. has just over 50 gigawatts of storage online today.
That means repowered solar farms could supply about a third of the growth in peak demand the North American Electric Reliability Corporation expects to be driven by data centers by 2035, the report found.
“Solar is entering its first replacement cycle at this moment when we are seeing a structural increase in demand,” Lisa Hansmann, the director of energy company Foundry-Logic and one of the paper’s authors, told me. “The more we dug in, the more it became clear that this market is early, but it is fast growing and ultimately could be very large.”
Advances and cost declines in battery technology are key to harnessing this generation potential. If a developer wants to increase the output of their solar farm, they’ll likely have to get a new interconnection agreement, which can take years. Adding a battery to ensure the plant doesn’t send more power to the grid than it was initially approved for can help avoid that, although it depends on the specs of the project, the location, and regional regulatory requirements.
Foundry-Logic, which published the paper in partnership with the clean energy finance company Crux, is focused on “getting more out of the installed base of energy systems.” The paper, in other words, is essentially Foundry-Logic’s sales pitch. It estimates that when combined with battery storage, repowering will represent a $10.8 billion market in 2030, growing to $51.8 billion by 2040.
The estimates are certainly on the high end of what’s possible, however, as the authors looked at technical potential rather than regulatory or economic feasibility. While the first half of the paper highlights the reasons repowering can be so attractive — existing interconnections, land leases, and permits — the second half digs into the real-world conditions that complicate that narrative.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission requires regional transmission organizations to offer “surplus interconnection service,” rules that allow new generators to skip the interconnection queue if they connect to the grid using the same infrastructure as an existing power source, so long as there’s “surplus” room to connect at that node. The rules vary throughout the country, however. The paper finds that the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which covers much of the Midwest, has the most favorable regulations for repowering, followed by the Southwest Power Pool, which covers the swath of the country between Montana and the Texas panhandle. In the nation’s largest transmission region, PJM, the surplus interconnection process has historically taken nearly as long as the queue, but the regional operator recently indicated it’s considering reforming the process.
Requirements also vary widely depending on the type of project — utility-scale versus smaller solar farms versus rooftop arrays — as well as by state and region. Utility-scale projects require interconnection agreements from regional transmission operators, while smaller projects connect at the local distribution level with permission from the relevant utility.
“Policy is evolving to meet the market demand for speed to power, and that's one of the things we tried to highlight too,” Josh Price, the director of market intelligence and research at Crux, told me. Because of the data center buildout and surging energy demand, he said, state regulatory commissions have started to push their utilities to examine their distribution systems, identify where there’s available interconnection capacity, and create rules or pilot programs to leverage it.
Price added that another advantage to repowering projects is that developers don’t have to start the financing process from scratch. In most cases, they already have a lender, an equity sponsor, and potentially a tax equity partner. They might need to renegotiate terms, but they also have 10 to 15 years of real-world data into how solar performs at the site, making it a less risky investment than a brand new development.
I spoke with one solar farm operator, CleanCapital, which owns many smaller sites throughout the country that were built in the early 2010s “and are needing more love,” as Zoe Berkery, the company’s chief operating officer, put it to me. The first step in deciding what to do with them, she said, is to try to extend the offtake contract for the power. “Otherwise, there would be no justification for pouring in so much additional capital into a site that may be rolling off in just a couple of years, so that piece has been something that CleanCapital has focused on pretty intensely over the last, I would say, six years,” she said.
CleanCapital has repowered some of its projects, but only to restore the original generating capacity. It has not yet added batteries to any legacy sites. Berkery said the company looked at adding batteries in New Jersey and California, but has not been able to make the economics work. “I do think there's a lot of potential there,” she said. “It just depends on the site, the space, the market.”
Hansmann told me that a lot has changed in the past year to make it easier to add batteries to existing solar sites, including new ways to get paid for energy storage, such as through participation in virtual power plants. For example, in June, Google announced it would fund a virtual power plant in PJM run by the company Voltus, which will aggregate batteries from homes and businesses, among other distributed energy resources.. “For the first time, you're having the technical potential and the commercial potential line up in a very interesting way.”
A permitting deal seems closer than ever — but possibly delayed til after the election.
This is an edition of Heatmap Daily, an evening review of the day’s news written by our executive editor. Sign up for it here.
Good afternoon and happy Friday.
Let’s start with the news: The new episode of our podcast, Shift Key, is my full interview with U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, which we recorded at Heatmap House in New York on Wednesday.
Listen to it here. You can find it on Heatmap’s website or wherever you get your podcasts. You don’t need to be a Heatmap subscriber to tune in.
My colleagues at Heatmap have covered a few takeaways from our conversation — including Secretary Wright’s prediction that there will not be a “blanket ban” on U.S. diesel exports, which he then hedged slightly — but we haven’t previewed everything, and I think the conversation is still worth your time. A few highlights:
We discussed the Trump administration’s lengthy war on wind and whether it might end in the future. “I do believe a successful permitting reform … changes the playing field for anything you want to build in this country, including wind,” Wright said. He also explained why he thought congressional Democrats should trust the administration’s word about that.
Wright hit on the Energy Department’s program to build a new fleet of nuclear reactors across the country, which could (if successful) bring roughly 10 gigawatts of zero-carbon electricity capacity online across five sites. There are now “well more than five” companies interested in entering the deal, he said, meaning that five will soon be selected. Allegedly there was a dinner last night to discuss the program, but we haven’t heard anything more about it.
Also up for discussion: whether the United States is leaning too hard into natural gas, how China has buttressed the global economy from the Strait of Hormuz oil shock, and why Wright thinks China is now the “swing importer” of oil globally and has successfully “taken off the peaks” of global pricing.
“If [China] were listening to me for their energy policy — and they are not — but if they were, I’d have them ramp up those refineries more rapidly because they have oil, the world has oil, but we’re very, very tight on refining capacity right now,” he said.
It was a fascinating conversation. Some of it pointed to ways that American energy policy will need to evolve in the future, regardless of which president or party is in charge. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube.
***
I’d be loath not to mention — at least briefly — all the movement in the past week on permitting reform.
When we last checked in on permitting over the summer, Daniel Palken, the head of infrastructure at Arnold Ventures, helped me understand the emerging outline of a bipartisan compromise deal on energy and infrastructure permitting. Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico also sketched the state of negotiations for us in August.
Since then, I had heard that Senate negotiators were making progress, but had not heard many concrete details. But this week we saw a flurry of activity. At the beginning of the week, the White House seemed to want to move quickly to seal a compromise, promising to allow stalled solar and wind projects to proceed in return for getting something inked before the midterm elections. (That said, actually getting a law passed before the November 3 elections would have required Speaker Mike Johnson to bring his caucus back to Washington, D.C.)
But late on Wednesday, Senate Democrats signaled that they want to slow down the talks and seemingly delay any deal until after November. “We believe there is a good deal to be had,” the lead Democratic negotiators, Senator Heinrich and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, said in a statement today. But “getting that [deal] right has to matter more than election-year deadlines.”
As a reminder, any permitting deal will need at least 60 votes in the Senate in order to clear the filibuster hurdle. That means such a deal will almost certainly need to be bipartisan — and therefore that a deal can only come together in a political environment where legislators from both parties feel like they can plausibly prosper in the near-term by making it easier to build. Right now, it seems like both parties do feel that way, even if they’re bickering about whether to get a deal done before or after November.
I have been careful not to endorse any bill until I see it, of course. It will all depend on what’s in the final text. But it would be a mistake, I think, for House and Senate Democrats to let this legislating opportunity pass them by if they are indeed so close to a deal that the decarbonization hawks Whitehouse and Heinrich feel good about. Just because Congress reaches a deal now doesn’t mean it can’t reach another one in the future. As we’ve discussed on Shift Key, recent history suggests that when lawmakers adjust one part of the law or one statute, they feel more comfortable returning to it in the future, making further addendums as needed.
Remember: Because federal permitting laws chiefly constrain what the government can do, they act as a brake primarily on public infrastructure. It took years, recall, for state and local governments in New York to get the permits necessary to implement their own scheme to tax traffic congestion in New York City. If you want to build big new infrastructure in the United States, be it high-speed trains, transmission lines, or zero-carbon power plants — and if you specifically want the government to build public works faster and better than it has in recent decades — then you should want a different federal permitting scheme than we have now. Let’s hope congressional Democrats remember that in the days, weeks, and months to come.
