New GET analysis is a “wake-up call” on interconnection woes

According to a report published this week by the Rocky Mountain Institute, transmission upgrades in the form of grid-enhancing technologies — hardware and software tools designed to increase capacity and flexibility in the existing system — have the potential to ease interconnection woes and offer important savings in some of the country’s most challenging regions.

• The top line: GET deployment could serve as a highly efficient network upgrade alternative and a potential workaround to slow an expensive transmission buildout. In PJM, where interconnection backlogs are immense, the report estimates GETs could enable 6.6 gigawatts of new wind, solar, and storage projects to come online by 2027, saving $1 billion in annual production costs in the process.
• The market grounding: PJM is the largest wholesale electricity market in the world, with an average load of 90 GW. Wind and solar accounted for less than 5% of the region’s generation in 2023, and interconnection wait times are among the longest in the country. And while a handful of pilots have been deployed in the region, GETs haven’t yet been used in grid planning, and adoption lags “far behind the technological potential,” the report said.
• The current take: Hudson Gilmer, co-founder and CEO of LineVision, said he’s seeing a shift in how utilities are thinking about grid-enhancing technologies, thanks in part to the proliferation of data centers, domestic manufacturing, and electrification. The scope of the report, he said, is key. “A lot of the results we’ve seen have been on a project-level, and this raises the visibility,” he added. “A billion dollars in annual savings is really a wake-up call about the fact that this is low-hanging fruit for how we address the interconnection queue, and even more broadly, how we support load growth and reduce congestion on our grid.”

Dynamic line rating solutions, which are used to track real-time transmission line capacity with the goal of increasing transfer limits, are one of three technologies RMI’s report examined. The study also included advanced power flow controls and topology optimization, technologies used to reroute power flows to avoid congested lines. 

GETs are less expensive than most other interconnection upgrades. Compared to reconductoring or rebuilding a line, advanced power flow controls, for example, could save PJM more than $500 million, RMI found.

Despite the cost saving opportunities, GET deployment in the U.S. has so far been relatively limited. For example, just 1% of transmission lines in the U.S. utilize dynamic line rating, Gilmer said.

GET technology (and perception) has evolved in recent years, he added. “A lot of the earlier DLR technologies required outages, required live line work, and were notoriously unreliable,” he explained. “We’ve come a long way in terms of reliability and the ease of installation.”

The bigger issue, he said, is the scale of change the proliferation of GETs would mean.

“Really, what we’re doing is changing the way the grid has operated for a hundred years,” Gilmer said. As utilities undertake their first projects, they have to be extremely rigorous, he added, which means they may take a year or more to integrate data and conduct security audits.

The good news is that those first experimental projects are already happening, even in early stages. “Once those first projects are completed, they really open the floodgates for the utilities who crossed that threshold to be able to use this technology much more widely on their systems,” he said.

To boost the use of grid-enhancing tech in PJM in particular, RMI recommended the transmission operator require interconnection studies to consider the tools, develop in-house training for its own staff, and ensure its software providers have GETs capabilities. 

Transmission owners should push to deploy an inaugural GETs project, while developers should be proposing GETs as alternative network upgrades during the interconnection study process, the report concluded.

Ultimately, GETs are something of a mitigation tactic to help bring new resources online faster and more cheaply, making the most of the existing grid while RTOs and transmission providers pursue necessary expansions.

“Our grid is stuck in the past,” said Greg Poulos, executive director of the nonprofit Consumer Advocates of PJM States. “In our region, we need to plan better, forecast more accurately, and build the grid of the 21st century,” he said. “In order for that to be cost-effective, we have to look at advanced technologies, and GETs are a key part of that.”