New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill aims to “cut through permitting roadblocks” and interconnection delays to “get solar projects” in the state “done now,” she said during her election campaign. “We don’t have enough in-state generation to keep costs low and we risk missing our clean power targets,” she said.
Virginia Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger spoke in her campaign of “exploring opportunities” for surplus interconnection, a strategy for using points of interconnection that are currently used part-time, among other approaches to expand solar and storage in the state.
Advanced Energy United plans to promote surplus interconnection in Virginia, said Jim Purekal, an AEU director, speaking on an AEU press conference. He noted that some existing generators in Virginia are “only operating at about a third of their capacity,” and called for enabling solar, wind or storage to connect to the transmission grid at those locations.
Two University of California researchers found that surplus interconnection could fast-track 102 GW of solar across the PJM grid region, which includes Virginia, “bypassing” PJM’s “congested” interconnection queues.
Other grid operators in the U.S. are already implementing surplus interconnection, Purekal said, “and we want to implement it correctly in Virginia. We’re relying on Governor Spanberger to help us get there.”
He explained that PJM recently began allowing surplus interconnection, under new rules approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
“We’re going to be running legislation” in Virginia next year “that will try to push Dominion,” the state’s largest utility, “to look at surplus interconnection as a valuable resource,” he said.
In New Jersey, AEU will focus on the issue of permitting. Katie Mettle, an AEU principal, said New Jersey’s governor has the power to direct the Department of Environmental Protection and the Board of Public Utilities “to fast-track siting and permitting, to open up additional areas to solar development, and to streamline or redesign existing programs to eliminate delays and to maximize the number of projects that can benefit.”
Spanberger during her campaign also called for:
- Incentivizing solar deployment “in commonsense locations” such as abandoned mine sites, rooftops, and parking lots, and also at schools and public buildings.
- Encouraging Virginians to make use of cost-reducing options such as community solar.
- Increasing transmission capacity using grid-enhancing technologies, a term that often includes advanced conductors that can enable more solar on the grid.
- Encouraging clean on-site and off-site generation and storage at data centers.
Sherrill said in her campaign that she would convene an emergency meeting of New Jersey utilities “to ensure they are connecting new, cheaper and cleaner generating projects” quickly, and would work with utilities to address “bottlenecks at our grid operator, PJM.”
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