In the pursuit of meeting expanding clean energy goals and growing electricity demand, states often face complex challenges of maintaining both grid reliability and reasonable customer costs. Recent developments have highlighted the enabling role that well-designed transmission additions must play in cost-effectively meeting state clean energy and decarbonization goals. Uneconomic generation resources are being retained beyond their anticipated retirement dates, raising customer costs, and resulting in immediate-need, siloed transmission development to maintain local reliability.
Reform efforts associated with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Order 1920 to improve long-term transmission planning are likely to require nearly a decade of compliance, litigation, implementation, planning, procurement, and permitting before efficient holistic transmission solutions might begin construction. Even with these Order 1920 compliance efforts underway, continued challenges in deploying new resources indicate that large near-term improvements are unlikely under the status quo.
In pursuit of more actionable processes for states to meet short-term transmission needs, this paper “Pathways to Coordination: Proactive, State-Led Transmission Development to Reduce Costs and Achieve Goals in PJM” by ACORE identifies and explores seven pathways that states can pursue to identify more cost effective, coordinated, and proactively planned transmission solutions.
Access the complete paper here
