Extensive electricity grid and transmission buildout, along with upgrades, are underway around the world, but nowhere near fast enough to keep up with plans for the green energy transition.
Outdated regulatory frameworks – which already leave projects such as wind farms languishing in grid connection queues for years – are only compounding the problem, as are supply chain constraints.
Combined, these issues are denting project profitability and wind developer bottom lines significantly.
In the US alone, more than 360GW of wind projects were in grid interconnection queues at the end of 2023, according to the Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission’s (Ferc) latest State of the Market report, with offshore wind accounting for 120GW. This is alongside even larger amounts of solar and storage capacity.
And the queues are growing.
As we highlight in this report, the picture is the same in other key wind markets. Grid queues are growing almost everywhere, wind projects are suffering delays and increased costs as a result, and governments, regulators and transmission system operators (TSOs) are scrambling for solutions.
