Government research shows that solar panel plus accumulation is becoming dominant in the country’s power grid queues, introducing most new power plant applications.
As the queues for electricity generation projects in the country’s power grids continue to grow, its composition is evolving. Solar panels and batteries are beginning to dominate the country’s energy future.
Lawrence Berkeley’s National Laboratory for Electricity Markets and Policy (EMP) National Laboratory has released its annual power queue update. The country queue contains more than 1 TWac of generation capacity. The new capacity added to the queue this year exceeds 600 GWac and comes from more than 3,000 unique projects.
The solar photovoltaic system in the queue is 676 GW / ~ 845 GW of constant power at the end of 2021. 85% of the new capacity came from solar and energy storage facilities. Solar combined with energy storage is now over 285 GW of capacity in the queue.
In essence, the California solar energy market-wide utility is now a solar storage market. In total, more than 400 GW of energy storage capacity is in the queue.
The EMP team notes that the number of hours of energy storage is not available. The author estimates that the average battery has at least two and a half hours of capacity, which would increase the total hour of capacity by one terawatt-hour.
It is planned that 80% of the total solar power will be included by the end of 2024; however, only 13% of all solar projects have a signed connection agreement. The report notes that in some markets, interconnection is provided before the project finds a buyer. In these markets, some projects that have been approved for interconnection are not under construction.
This moment is realized when the full choice opens, and we see that almost three times more projects are withdrawn than existing ones:
- 8133 “active” projects
- 12,585 “withdrawn” projects
- 3439 “operational” projects
- 229 “suspended” projects
The level of solar energy completion in all regions is 16% – lower than the national average.
And if we make analogies, the proof in PJM pudding – the network management team states that they are overloaded with solar and wind and that they suggest closing all new interconnection applications for the next two years when they re-evaluate their processes.
From 2015 to 2021, the report notes that the time required to move from submission to interconnection, to approval of interconnection, has increased dramatically to more than 3 years – with the exception of Texas ERCOT.
Among all these problems, one statistic shines through. Last year pv magazine usa reported that the current queue already corresponds to 85% of the estimated 1.1 TWac of power required to clean our power grid. An EMP report released this year confirms that figure.
In addition, the amount of capacity covered by this document includes only utility projects from 85% of national utilities. For example, hundreds of megawatts of power are deployed Hawaii, gigawatt new york community distributed solarand Massachusetts market behind the counternot taken into account.
At least 6.6 GW of power deployed in 2021 would not be on the list.
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https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/05/09/approximately-858-gwdc-of-solar-and-over-1-twh-of-batteries-are-in-development/
