The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has completed the first phase of the National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors (NIETC) program with the release of potential regions for grid expansion.
The four-phase NIETC, supported by the Inflation Reduction Act’s $2 billion Transmission Facility Financing program (TFF), not only aims to expand the transmission system but also to modernize it, with the ultimate goals of improving grid climate resilience and increasing access to clean power.
The potential NIETC areas are New York-New England, New York-Mid-Atlantic, Mid-Atlantic-Canada, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest-Plains, Northern Plains, Delta-Plains, Plains-Southwest, Mountain-Plains-Southwest and Mountain-Northwest.
The list, formulated based on public recommendations, now undergoes a 45-day public comment running until June 24, in the NIETC program’s second phase. Phase two gathers public comments on the geographic boundaries and the potential impacts of establishing an NIETC on the environment and the community.
In the third phase, expected to start in the fall, the DOE will “draft NIETC designation reports, conduct environmental reviews, proceed with government-to-government consultation with any impacted Tribal Nations as appropriate, and engage in robust public engagement”, the DOE said in a statement announcing the preliminary list.
The fourth phase involves issuing final NIETCs and mandatory environmental documents, as well as providing federal funding to transmission developers.
“The President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law amended the Federal Power Act to clarify the Secretary of Energy’s ability to designate any geographic area as a NIETC if it is determined that consumers are harmed, now or in the future, by a lack of transmission in the area and that the development of new transmission would advance important national interests for that region, such as increased reliability and reduced consumer costs”, the DOE said.
“A NIETC designation unlocks critical federal financing and permitting tools to spur transmission development, including direct loans through the TFF program, public-private partnerships through the Transmission Facilitation Program, and Federal siting and permitting authority of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in certain limited circumstances.
“Developers and state and local siting authorities may also be able to leverage the environmental analysis conducted by DOE as part of the NIETC designation process to complete local siting and permitting processes, which could ultimately accelerate siting and permitting for transmission projects in these targeted, high-priority areas”.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm commented, “At more than a century old, our power grid is showing its age, leaving American consumers to bear the costs of maintaining it with frequent and longer power outages from extreme weather”.
John Podesta, senior advisor to President Joe Biden for international climate policy, said, “In order to reach our clean energy and climate goals, we've got to build out transmission as fast as possible to get clean power from where it's produced to where it's needed”.
Faster Interconnection for Clean Power
NIECTs aim to grow the deployment of clean energy, including offshore wind, toward a carbon-neutral power sector.
The U.S. aims to raise offshore wind deployment to 30 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, as announced by the DOE March 29, 2021.
On December 8, 2021, Biden signed an executive order to migrate the U.S. to 100 percent clean power by 2035.
Nearly 12,000 power projects representing 1,570 GW of generation capacity are seeking interconnection to the grid, according to a report by the government-run Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) last month. Solar, wind and storage projects account for 95 percent of the queue capacity.
“Only ~19 percent of projects (14 percent of capacity) requesting interconnection from 2000-2018 reached commercial operations by the end of 2023”, said the LBL study funded by the DOE. “Completion rates are even lower for solar (14 percent) and battery (11 percent) projects”.
Later in April the DOE unveiled what it said is the country’s first-ever roadmap for fast-tracking the connection of renewable energy to the national grid. The Transmission Interconnection Roadmap sets targets by 2030 concerning project approval times, costs and completion rates. It presents measures for “increasing data access, transparency, and security for interconnection; improving interconnection process and timeline; promoting economic efficiency in interconnection; and maintaining a reliable, resilient, and secure grid”, the DOE said in a statement April 17.
The roadmap aims to reduce the average time it takes to reach an interconnection agreement to less than 12 months—from 33 months in 2022—using the date of the interconnection request as the reference point.
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