CONTACT US
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RUBEN @ REGIMEENERGY . COM
Financing the Future
Watch the webinar held October 15, 2024 discussing current challenges to interconnection & network upgrades, and a possible solution. Presented by
-Ruben Arredondo of Regime Energy Partners
-Jo Seel of the Department of Energy's Berkeley National Lab
-Avery Wendell of Tower Infrastructure Partners
Are interconnection logjams and expensive network upgrades negatively impacting the renewable energy transition?
Utility-scale developers face significantly increasing risks as RTOs, ISOs, and utilities require them to pay for the Network Upgrades (NUs) needed to interconnect and upgrade transmission systems. A recent study found that interconnection costs, driven largely by NUs, often reach $10 million or more and have surged 95% on a per MW basis in the past five years. NUs are fronted by the developer and then reimbursed by transmission owners, like a cheap, long-term loan to build out parts of a transmission system. The often black-boxed business practices and complexities that govern reimbursement mechanisms have increased risk and costs for developers. It’s not uncommon to see otherwise healthy projects die at the pre-dev stage when the sponsor cannot raise sufficient capital to fund the NUs. How is this impacting the renewable energy transition?
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​In this free, one-hour webinar, you will hear from the following speakers on these topics:
Ruben Arredondo
Ruben Arredondo from Regime Energy Partners on the increasing challenges related to interconnecting utility-scale generation and storage.
Energy Lawyer and Developer
Jo Seel
Jo Seel will present Berkeley National Lab's research on generator interconnection challenges. Leveraging comprehensive monitoring of the U.S. interconnection queues we find a recent explosion of developer interests with more than 2.6TW of mostly low-carbon technologies trying to come online. But the time required to complete interconnection studies has grown and most queue entrants have historically withdrawn their requests. Using a unique data set of interconnection costs across the ISOs we find that high interconnection costs are a key driver for abandoning queue positions. Even among those that do move forward, network upgrade costs in particular have grown over time. The presentation will conclude with DOE's Transmission Interconnection Roadmap identifying 35 solutions to reform the current interconnection process.
Berkeley National Laboratory
Avery Wendell
Avery Wendell will present Tower Infrastructure Partners (TIP) financial solution to the growing cost of Network Upgrades. New FERC regulations, rising Network Upgrade costs, and long interconnection queues open an opportunity for a novel way to finance this growing cost center for developers. TIP brings to bear 20 years of experience in the energy space to solve this burgeoning problem with a unique solution.
Tower Infrastucture Partners
