Waiting to Connect
If it’s been a while since you’ve driven across the Great Plains of the U.S, you may not have noticed that the renewable energy industry is booming. As with all things related to the energy transition, the story is complicated, though.
I first noticed the boom a few years ago sitting in a folding chair in the backyard of a friend in Iowa, where I had parked my travel trailer for a few days on a meandering return to Colorado after spending the summer in my former home state of Tennessee. I counted more than 80 giant turbines stretching to the horizon above the corn and beans as several crop dusters dove and climbed their way across the fields. It was a beautiful place to have a sunset beer.
More recently, I drove from my home in Denver, where you can regularly see trains laden with impossibly large blades for these wind-powered electricity generators gingerly making their way through downtown, to visit my mother in Nashville for a couple of weeks. The drive along I-70 across eastern Colorado and western Kansas is famously monotonous with endless wheat fields stretching as far as the eye can see.
If you are as inspired as I am by the sight of alternatives to coal-generated energy, however, that drive is now much more interesting. I didn’t count the number of turbines I saw, but it was definitely in the high 3 figures and maybe into the thousands. Similarly, although somewhat less visible because they hug the ground, solar farms are popping up everywhere as well.
The high visibility of these projects belies a different sort of inconvenient truth, however. It’s one thing to put up a new turbine or array of solar panels. It’s quite another to get that power where it can be put to use by connecting it to the national power grid.
As of the end of 2023, the cumulative capacity of the queue of power generation projects waiting to connect to the grid reached an all-time high of 2.6 Terawatts according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. To put that number in perspective, that’s double the size of the existing grid. Yes, DOUBLE.
At Tilt Global, the drum we are constantly beating is that there are no easy answers to the energy transition. Is it important to build out renewable sources of power generation? Absolutely. It is equally important to consider the entirety of the system that needs to be addressed from power generation to long distance transmission to distribution and consumption.
Point solutions that address a single aspect of the value chain will not move us appreciably toward a renewable energy future in the absence of an approach that includes broad-based systems thinking. We help enterprises learn to navigate these complexities.