Are we there yet?

No, definitely not. But maybe you can see a path if you squint hard enough?

The energy transition is going to take a really long time. This means that we are going to have to suffer through a lot of people asking “what’s taking so long?” and it will be tempting to think we see the light at the end of the tunnel. We recently learned that there’s 2.6 TW of generation and storage capacity in the interconnection queue, 95% of which is low-carbon like wind, solar and storage. Lots of folks were quick to point out that this is more than the entire nameplate capacity of the United States!

That’s maybe misleading though – wind and solar have very low capacity factors. So how close are we to having a pipeline of projects that could cover our clean power needs? I hadn’t seen anyone do this, so I did the math:

It looks like 2022 was the first year we just barely maybe had enough annual clean energy production capacity in the various ISO queues to replace the 2500 TWh/year currently produced by fossil fuels. A few important caveats:

1. The United States produced 4,178 TWh in 2023. But 40% of that was already low carbon electricity. So we really only need 2,500 TWh of new clean power. 
2. But actually we probably need to roughly double or triple our total electricity production over the next 25 years. I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader.
3. This would only get you to an RE100-style goal: these projects will not be able to provide enough clean power in every hour of the year, but it does give a sense of how it could look if we built the right kind of storage (assuming that kind of storage exists at a reasonable price!).
4. These are “just” interconnection requests, and completion rates are below 20%. Powerhouse Ventures¹ wrote a great perspective on this challenge, including some ideas to improve the completion rate. 

We can also look at which ISOs have the most pipeline relative to how much clean electricity they would need to hit 100% clean power. This isn’t necessarily the fairest comparison (we’re more optimistic that ERCOT projects will be successful than CAISO projects, for example), it does maybe show why PJM felt the need to explain why they are last:

I was surprised to see NYISO doing so well (currently at 430%), and ERCOT only at 120%. CAISO at 424% is unsurprising, but it’s a bummer to see PJM as the only ISO that doesn’t have “enough” production in queue. I suspect many of the non-ISO grids are also not great. I should note that LBNL provided an effective load carrying capacity (ELCC) version of this versus peak demand by ISO in their companion presentation (slide 14) to the report. PJM still ranks poorly on that basis, but so does MISO.

1. I work for Powerhouse, and Powerhouse Ventures is a sister company. The views expressed here are the my own and do not reflect the views of Powerhouse or Powerhouse Ventures. ↩︎