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A renewable energy project can only start construction if it can get connected to the grid.

The clock is ticking for clean energy developers. With the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar developers have to start construction (whatever that means) in the next 12 months and be operating no later than the end of 2027 to qualify for federal tax credits.
But projects can only get built if they can get connected to the grid. Those decisions are often out of the hands of state, local, or even federal policymakers, and are instead left up to utilities, independent system operators, or regional transmission organizations, which then have to study things like the transmission infrastructure needed for the project before they can grant a project permission to link up.
This process, from requesting interconnection to commercial operation, used to take two years on average as of 2008; by 2023, it took almost five years, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This creates what we call the interconnection queue, where likely thousands of gigawatts of proposed projects are languishing, unable to start construction. The inability to quickly process these requests adds to the already hefty burden of state, local, and federal permitting and siting — and could mean that developers will be locked out of tax credits regardless of how quickly they move.
There’s no better example of the tension between clean energy goals and the process of getting projects into service than the Mid-Atlantic, home to the 13-state electricity market known as PJM Interconnection. Many states in the region have mandates to substantially decarbonize their electricity systems, whereas PJM is actively seeking to bring new gas-fired generation onto the grid in order to meet its skyrocketing projections of future demand.
This mismatch between current supply and present-and-future demand has led to the price for “capacity” in PJM — i.e. what the grid operator has greed to pay in exchange for the ability to call on generators when they’re most needed — jumping by over $10 billion, leading to utility bill hikes across the system.
“There is definitely tension,” Abe Silverman, a senior research scholar at Johns Hopkins University and former general counsel for New Jersey’s utility regulator, told me.
While Silverman doesn’t think that PJM is “philosophically” opposed to adding new resources, including renewables, to the grid, “they don’t have urgency you might want them to have. It’s a banal problem of administrative competency rather than an agenda to stymie new resources coming on the grid.”
PJM is in the midst of a multiyear project to overhaul its interconnection queue. According to a spokesperson, there are around 44,500 megawatts of proposed projects that have interconnection agreements and could move on to construction. Of these, I calculated that about 39,000 megawatts are solar, wind, or storage. Another 63,000 megawatts of projects are in the interconnection queue without an agreement, and will be processed by the end of next year, the spokesperson said, likely making it impossible for wind and solar projects to be “placed in service” by 2028.
Even among the projects with agreements, “there probably will be some winnowing of that down,” Mark Repsher, a partner at PA Consulting Group, told me. “My guess is, of that 44,000 megawatts that have interconnection agreements, they may have other challenges getting online in the next two years.”
PJM has attempted to place the blame for project delays largely at the feet of siting, permitting, and operations challenges.
“Some [projects] are moving to construction, but others are feeling the headwinds of siting and permitting challenges and supply chain backlogs,” PJM’s executive vice president of operations, planning, and security Aftab Khan said in a June statement giving an update on interconnection reforms.
And on high prices, PJM has been increasingly open about blaming “premature” retirements of fossil fuel power plants.
In May, PJM said in a statement in response to a Department of Energy order to keep a dual-fuel oil and natural gas plant in Pennsylvania open that it “has repeatedly documented and voiced its concerns over the growing risk of a supply and demand imbalance driven by the confluence of generator retirements and demand growth. Such an imbalance could have serious ramifications for reliability and affordability for consumers.”
Just days earlier, in a statement ahead of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission conference, PJM CEO Manu Asthana had fretted about “growing resource adequacy concerns” based on demand growth, the cost of building new generation, and, in a direct shot at federal and state policies that encouraged renewables and discouraged fossil fuels, “premature, primarily policy-driven retirements of resources continue to outpace the development of new generation.”
The Trump administration has echoed these worries for the whole nation’s electrical grid, writing in a report issued this week that “if current retirement schedules and incremental additions remain unchanged, most regions will face unacceptable reliability risks.” So has the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which argued in a 2024 report that most of the U.S. and Canada “faces mounting resource adequacy challenges over the next 10 years as surging demand growth continues and thermal generators announce plans for retirement.”
State officials and clean energy advocates have instead placed the blame for higher costs and impending reliability gaps on PJM’s struggles to connect projects, how the electricity market is designed, and the operator’s perceived coolness towards renewables.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro told The New York Times in June that the state should “re-examine” its membership in PJM following last year’s steep price hikes. In February, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin wrote a letter calling for Asthana to be fired. (He will leave the transmission organization by the end of the year, although PJM says the decision was made before Youngkin’s letter.)
That conflict will likely only escalate as developers rush to start projects — which they can only do if they can get an interconnection services agreement from PJM.
In contrast to Silverman, Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program, told me that “PJM, internally and operationally, believes that renewables are a drag on the grid and that dispatchable generation, particularly fossil fuels and nuclear, are essential.”
In May, for instance, PJM announced that it had selected 51 projects for its “Reliability Resource Initiative,” a one-time special process for adding generation to the grid over the next five to six years. The winning bids overwhelmingly involved expanding existing gas-fired plants or building new ones.
The main barrier to getting the projects built that have already worked their way through the queue, Repsher told me, is “primarily permitting.” But even with new barriers thrown up by the OBBBA, “there’s going to be appetite for these projects,” thanks to high demand, Repsher said. “It’s really just navigating all the logistical hurdles.”
Some leaders of PJM states are working on the permitting and deployment side of the equation while also criticizing the electricity market. Pennsylvania’s Shapiro has proposed legislation that would set up a centralized state entity to handle siting for energy projects. Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed legislation in May that would accelerate permitting for energy projects, including preempting local regulations for siting solar.
New Jersey, on the other hand, is procuring storage projects directly.
The state has a mandate stemming from its Clean Energy Act of 2018 to add 2,000 megawatts of energy storage by 2030. In June, New Jersey’s utility regulator started a process to procure at least half of that through utility-scale projects, funded through an existing utility-bill-surcharge.
New Jersey regulators described energy storage as “the most significant source of near-term capacity,” citing specifically the fact that storage makes up the “bulk” of proposed energy capacity in New Jersey with interconnection approval from PJM.
While the regulator issued its order before OBBBA passed, the focus on storage ended up being advantageous. The bill treats energy storage far more generously than wind and solar, meaning that New Jersey could potentially expand its generation capacity with projects that are more likely to pencil due to continued access to tax credits. The state is also explicitly working around the interconnection queue, not raging against it: “PJM interconnection delays do not pose a significant obstacle to a Phase 1 transmission-scale storage procurement target of 1,000 MW,” the order said.
In the end, PJM and the states may be stuck together, and their best hope could be finding some way to work together — and they may not have any other choice.
“A well-functioning RTO is the best way to achieve both low rates for consumers and carbon emissions reductions,” Evan Vaughan, the executive director of MAREC Action, a trade group representing Mid-Atlantic solar, wind, and storage developers, told me. “I think governors in PJM understand that, and I think that they’re pushing on PJM.”
“I would characterize the passage of this bill as adding fuel to the fire that was already under states and developers — and even energy offtakers — to get more projects deployed in the region.”
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That means it’s also buying natural gas — but by storing the emissions, the company says, it can still meet its climate goals.
Google is buying gas. The hyperscale tech company — which invented the power purchase agreement as a way to support renewables development in the 2010s and has been a leader in setting standards for and procuring renewable power — announced on Thursday that it is agreeing to buy the majority of the power generated by a planned natural gas-fired plant in Decatur, Illinois. Here’s the twist: The plant will also capture and store its carbon emissions, a first of its kind installation at commercial scale.
The Broadwing Energy Center will be developed by Low Carbon Infrastructure on a site owned by agribusiness giant ADM. The facility features an existing ethanol plant with carbon capture and storage nearby, including the Class VI wells necessary for carbon dioxide sequestration. The plant will provide 400 megawatts of power, as well as steam for the ADM facility.
“We’re going to work with LCI to hopefully have it all up and running by early 2030,” Michael Terrell, Google’s head of advanced energy, told me.
While CCS has not yet been developed at anything like a commercial scale, it is already both a bogeyman and a panacea in the decarbonization debate — or as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has called it, “an oil exec’s fantasy, an environmentalist’s nightmare, and an energy expert’s object of fascination.”
Natural gas with CCS promises the dispatchability of natural gas — power produced exactly when and in the exact amounts the grid needs — without the greenhouse emissions of traditional gas plants. The problem is that the technology is expensive, meaning that its development has largely been seen to depend on emissions regulations that would essentially force generators to build or install CCS.
Those regulations were finalized during the final year of Biden’s presidency and, unsurprisingly, are no longer happening. That leaves the private sector to bear the cost and technological uncertainty of CCS development, with little obvious financial incentive to do so.
While this is Google’s first gas deal, it is not entirely unexpected. Google hit its initial goal of matching its worldwide energy consumption with renewable energy generation on an annual basis in 2017, upgrading that goal in 2020 to aim at generating clean power on a 24/7 basis in the same area that its energy consumption occurs by 2030.
This meant going beyond wind and solar and procuring power from generators that worked in all weather and at night.
In the same 2020 whitepaper where Google set out its hourly matching goal, it specifically mentioned CCS as one of “a number of emergent technologies” that “appear to be making good progress.”
In another 2023 whitepaper, Google affirmed its commitment to clean firm technology beyond wind and solar, adding that “we must also develop and commercialize new technologies to fully decarbonize electricity systems quickly and cost-effectively while maintaining reliability.” Once again it called out “power generation with carbon capture and storage” by name.
Since then Google has struck a number of deals to support clean firm development, including a development agreement with the advanced nuclear company Kairos and a “clean transition tariff” agreement with utility NV Energy to pay for geothermal power in Nevada produced by the enhanced geothermal company Fervo.
But carbon capture and storage remained in the picture as something that would be key for Google to meet its goals. “We set 24/7 carbon free energy as our North Star,” Terrell told me. “The other critical piece to that is CCS.”
At the same time, Google — and the rest of the technology industry — has been on a data center building spree, moving as fast as it can to put up bigger data centers that turn electricity into artificial intelligence. This has meant rising power usage and emissions. In 2024, Google reported that its emissions had gone up almost 50% over the previous five years, following a similar announcement from Microsoft.
“We’re still committed to those goals. They’re extremely ambitious, and we’ve never been shy about sharing that. 24/7 carbon free energy is a moonshot, but we are pushing very, very hard,” Terrell said.
The turn to CCS is not just driven by the advantages gas has over renewables — namely dispatchability — but also by the current political environment.
Google has a long track record of buying the output from renewables projects, including wind, in the broader Midcontinent Independent System Operator grid, where the Decatur project sits. But on a national basis, Terrell noted, “we’re seeing headwinds in the market due to policy changes” for renewables.
Solar and wind have now lost some of the incentives that spurred huge growth in both sectors in recent years, while projects that can pass the regulatory gauntlet have to linger in interconnection queues to get approved by electricity markets and often require transmission that can be expensive and challenging to build. The Trump administration has specifically targeted renewables — especially wind — for regulatory scrutiny, which will likely hinder renewable development in MISO, which gets 15% of its power from wind — far more than from solar, and about comparable with its nuclear generation.
“The markets are tough because of some of the changes in policy, interconnection rules, and lack of transmission,” Terrell said. “That’s certainly affecting our ability to procure with speed and scale.”
Google and LCI claim that the Broadwing plant will be able to capture and store over 90% of its carbon dioxide emissions.
The project started, LCI chief executive Jonathan Wiens told me, in 2020, primarily as an industrial decarbonization project to provide low-emissions steam to ADM for its food processing efforts, with the rest of the power going to the grid.“In the midst of this development,” Wiens said, “there were data centers that were 40 megawatts. Now they’re aspiring to be a gigawatt-plus, and it’s totally changed the power end of this.”
Of Google, he said, “they put their money where their mouth is and they’re willing to participate in a project.”
Both Terrell and Wiens confirmed that Google wanted to work with LCI beyond developing and purchasing power from the Broadwing facility. “It’s not just this one plant,” Wiens said. “It’s a much broader approach to deploying this in as many places as we can.”
Google did not disclose the terms of the PPA, but Terrell said, “We believe that CCS can be competitive at scale with other generation technologies, and certainly other low carbon or zero carbon generation technologies.”
Over time, he added, LCI and Google should be able to drive down prices as they work on more power plants. “That’s certainly something that we’re hoping to do.”
On Tesla’s profit plunge, Josh Shapiro’s battery win, and TVA staying public
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Melissa is now forecast to strengthen into a hurricane, with the potential to dump 30 inches of rain over parts of the Caribbean and blow winds of up to 50 miles per hour • Waves brought on by Tropical Storm Fengshen are big enough to rip up sidewalks in Vietnam • Myanmar broke an October heat record with temperatures of nearly 98 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern resort town of Kyeikkhame.

Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, threatened to withhold votes on permitting reforms he endorsed unless the Trump administration backs off what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman dubbed the “total war on wind.” At an unrelated hearing on Wednesday, Whitehouse said that “unless these illegal acts stop and unless offshore wind is included, there will be no permitting deal,” Politico reporter Josh Siegel reported on X. The remarks came two days after Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said the administration would not halt its attempts to block construction of offshore turbines in exchange for a bipartisan bill to overhaul federal permitting. “I hadn’t thought about the idea of trading something that makes sense for everybody in America for something that makes no sense — and that’s sort of how I view offshore wind,” Burgum said at an American Petroleum Institute event.
As I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, US Wind warned in federal court this week that, if the administration wins its court case to revoke the project’s construction and operating permits, the Baltimore-based developer will likely go bankrupt. While Secretary of Energy Chris Wright dismissed the wind assault as a “one-off exception, or one-off complication,” the oil industry doesn’t see it that way. As I wrote earlier this month, Shell’s top U.S. executive spoke forcefully against the administration’s anti-wind crusade, warning that Democrats could use the precedents being set against oil and gas companies in the future. That isn’t slowing the administration’s plans to expand offshore oil drilling, however. A document leaked to the Houston Chronicle this week shows that the White House aims to open broad swaths of both the east and west coasts to offshore drilling, months after the administration rescinded designations for millions of acres of federal waters to serve for seaborne wind turbine development.
Tesla’s profit tanked 37% to $1.4 billion from a year earlier despite a revenue hike of 12% to $28.1 billion, the company reported in its latest quarterly earnings Wednesday evening. The automaker sold more cars in the last quarter than it did in the same period a year prior but still lost money on price cuts and low-interest loans. Elon Musk’s electric automaker rolled out stripped-down versions of its Model Y sport utility vehicle and its Model 3 sedan earlier this month, effectively matching the prices that buying an entry-level Tesla came out to before Trump rescinded the $7,500 federal tax credit for battery-powered cars last month. “In other words, you can still buy a Tesla in the $35,000 to $40,000 range,” Andrew Moseman wrote in Heatmap. “It just won’t be as good a Tesla as you used to be able to get for the money.”
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the market, Tesla rival Rivian’s micromobility spinoff, Also, debuted a product meant to capture a share of the luxury segment that wants a $4,500 electric bicycle.
Last week, the Department of Energy confirmed plans to revoke $700 million in grants to American battery manufacturers, as I reported here on Monday. This week, Pennsylvania made up for a small part of that lost funding. Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro announced plans to give Eos Energy Enterprises roughly $22 million in grants and capital funding to lure the nation’s leading manufacturer of zinc-based battery storage systems to relocate its headquarters from Edison, New Jersey, to Pittsburgh, and open a new factory in Allegheny County. Combined with the money the company is spending, the total investment will come to just under $353 million and create 735 new permanent positions. “Pennsylvania is positioning itself at the forefront of America’s energy transition — enabling us to bring America’s battery to scale,” Joe Mastrangelo, the chief executive of Eos Energy, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, in another electorally crucial northern state, OpenAI announced plans for yet another data center in its Stargate network. On Wednesday, the ChatGPT maker and software giant Oracle unveiled plans for a data center campus outside Milwaukee in Port Washington, Wisconsin, to be built with hyperscale developer Vantage Data Centers.
Trump’s nominees to serve in the empty seats on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s board of directors all pledged to oppose any privatization effort of the nation’s largest government-owned utility, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported. Selling off all or portions of the TVA, a remnant of the New Deal-era electrification of the South, have come up frequently since the mid 20th century, including under former President Barack Obama. Trump revived the debate in his first administration, proposing to sell off the TVA’s transmission and distribution business, but the effort went nowhere. In July, the White House abruptly moved to fire the remaining three members of the TVA’s board that Trump hadn’t yet dismissed unless they forced out the chief executive. The move was interpreted by insiders at the TVA as the first step toward a new privatization effort. But outcry over the potential to disrupt what has been a steady source of cheap electricity for the region appears to have tempered those ambitions.
An ounce of beef requires roughly 7,600 times more energy and 1.1 million times more water than a single prompt on ChaptGPT, a University of California academic recently calculated. Yet nearly two-and-a-half times more Americans are concerned about the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence than about meat production, according to a poll released Thursday morning by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Of the 72% of Americans who expressed concern about AI’s environmental footprint, 41% said they were “very or extremely” concerned. That exceeds how many respondents said the same thing about cryptocurrency (29%), meat production (29%), and air travel (23%.) “Looking ahead, Americans are more likely to believe AI will be harmful rather than helpful to society, the economy, and the environment in the next 10 years,” the pollsters explained in a press release, “but they are divided on its impact on them personally.”
The findings mirror Heatmap Pro’s own survey results from August, which found that just 44% of Americans would welcome a data center nearby.
Americans are kings in our own castles, while Germans bow to a Kafkaesque bureaucracy even in their own homes … right? Not when it comes to installing batteries and solar panels on our own roofs. Germans just have to fill out a simple two-page application. Americans? Depending on where we live, we have to fill out all kinds of physical paperwork, get multiple rounds of approval from zoning officials and homeowners associations, and navigate disparate systems at the neighborhood, county, and state levels. That’s according to a new analysis that the group Permit Power shared with me exclusively for Heatmap. The report proposed axing that red tape. Doing so could dramatically lower the cost of rooftop solar and batteries, and ultimately save Americans more than $1 trillion — yes, with a T — over the next quarter-century.
A new analysis by Permit Power calculates the cumulative benefits of cheap rooftop solar over the lifetime of a typical rig.
Liberty-loving Americans are prone to poke fun at the bureaucratic nightmares Australians and Germans face when attempting to do just about anything. But try installing solar panels on your roof in the U.S. Americans pay a median price of $28,000 for a 7-kilowatt system. The typical Australian, meanwhile, spends just $4,000, and the German — after filling out a mere two-page application — pays $10,000 per project.
How is this possible? Blame state and local governments, and even homeowners associations, for holding back Americans from generating their own carbon-free electricity from the sun with onerous permitting regimes, inspection requirements, and interconnection processes.
It doesn’t have to be this way. A new analysis by the research group Permit Power, shared exclusively with Heatmap, outlines a path toward slashing the red tape.
The nonprofit, which advocates for fewer restrictions on renewables, proposed that states adopt several policies already popular in other countries. Those include adopting software that will allow for virtually instantaneous permitting of solar and battery projects, allowing for remote inspections verified via photos or video submitted online, and automatic grid interconnections for residential systems that use smart inverters that manage voltage and frequency to keep energy flowing safely back and forth onto power lines.
If states championed the reforms, the analysis found, more than 18 million U.S. households could afford solar that can’t today. Given rising electricity rates, the free power the panels would provide during the day would shave an average $1,600 off households’ annual utility bills, growing to $56,000 over the 25-year lifetime of a typical rooftop solar system. That would deliver cumulative savings to the U.S. of $1.2 trillion over that time period.
“It’s a number that starts with a ‘t,’” Nick Josefowitz, Permit Power’s founder and chief executive, told me. “That’s a really big number.”
Examples cited in the report highlight just how much time and effort Americans need to go through to install solar panels or batteries even if they can afford the high cost of the equipment.
Illinois requires paper submissions of permitting and inspection documents and approvals from multiple agencies with different document requirements for each local government. Minnesota mandates in-person submission of documents and monthly township meetings for zoning approvals before construction. New York sets strict limits on batteries and requires architects to review the projects in certain areas. Colorado’s bespoke file-naming conventions and mixed paper and digital formats create a bureaucratic quicksand that leads to increased corrections, resubmissions and delays.
“If you were to try and go city by city and modernize permitting in 20,000 different municipalities, that’d be an endless task,” Josefowitz said. “There’s hope we can solve these problems at the state level.” Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, and Texas have all passed legislation to streamline permitting processes in the past year, he said.
While most countries have a national system for regulating solar, “the U.S. is quite unique,” said Andrew Birch, the chief executive of Open Solar, a software company that helps solar installers navigate local rules. “It’s a problem that’s unique to the United States.”
The implications go beyond household electricity costs. The U.S. is struggling to meet surging electricity demand as the backlog of gas turbine orders mounts. Meanwhile, new nuclear reactors remain years away, and the Trump administration has cut back on federal investments in transmission lines and yanked permitting for large-scale solar and offshore wind projects.
By equipping more homes with equipment to generate and store their own electricity, households can temporarily go off-grid when demand is particularly high, freeing up far more room on the existing system for new sources of power and avoiding forced blackouts, said Jigar Shah, the former head of the Biden-era Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, who reviewed Permit Power’s findings.
While solar panels have gotten the most attention, he said, batteries are the critical equipment.
“Rooftop solar alone does very little to solve the growth issue. What really solves the growth issue is residential batteries,” Shah told me. “The reason you get solar is because charging those batteries off the grid is expensive. Solar off your roof might be 10 cents per kilowatt hour, while power from the utility is 30 cents.”
To Josefowitz, what makes his group’s findings so practical at this moment is that none of the policy proposals the report puts forward depend on the federal government.
“If we had to go through the federal government, we couldn’t because no one is working there right now — and even when they were working they struggled to come to agreement on anything,” he said. “We can solve these problems at the state level, and allow American families to have the nice things at the nice prices that families in Australia and Germany enjoy.”