The POWER Podcast POWER

There are several obstacles to overcome when building a clean-energy project, but perhaps the biggest is getting through the generator interconnection queue (GIQ). Every regional transmission organization (RTO) and independent system operator (ISO) in the U.S. has a significant backlog in its GIQ and processing interconnection requests can take years to complete. This has created a significant barrier to deploying renewable energy, as companies often face long wait times, and high costs for new transmission lines and other upgrades when the local grid is near or at capacity.
Part of the problem is the complexity of the interconnection process, which involves multiple studies. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) reports that historically about 70% of projects submitted to its queue ultimately withdraw, resulting in extensive rework and delays, as studies must be redone when projects withdraw.
MISO recognizes change is necessary and has implemented some reforms. On Jan. 19, 2024, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) accepted MISO’s filing (ER24-340) to increase milestone payments, adopt an automatic withdrawal penalty, revise withdrawal penalty provisions, and expand site control requirements. These provisions were designed to help expedite the GIQ process, and maximize transparency and certainty. MISO said the filing was developed through extensive collaboration in the stakeholder process, including multiple discussions in the Planning Advisory Committee and Interconnection Process Working Group. MISO expects these reforms to reduce the number of queue requests withdrawing from the process. It said the fewer projects in studies, the quicker the evaluations can be completed, and the fewer projects that withdraw, the more certain phase 1 and 2 study results are.
Still, it’s likely that more needs to be done to improve the GIQ process. The Clean Grid Alliance (CGA), a nonprofit organization that works to advance renewable energy in the Midwest, conducted a survey of 14 clean energy developers who’ve had solar, wind, hybrid, and battery storage projects in the MISO interconnection queue over the last five years to better understand the challenges they’ve faced.
Aside from interconnection queue challenges, the CGA survey also identified other hindrances to clean-energy project development. Soholt explained that a lot of development work is done face to face. COVID prevented that, which was a big problem that had a ripple effect. Some leases that developers had negotiated began to expire, so they had to go back out to communities and renegotiate.
“Siting in general is getting more difficult, as we do more volume, as we do transmission in the MISO footprint,” said Soholt. “We need new generation to be sited, we need new transmission, and we have to find a pathway forward on that community acceptance piece,” she said.
Among other challenges, Soholt said some projects saw generator interconnection agreements (GIAs) timing out and needing MISO extensions. Meanwhile, transmission upgrade delays also presented problems, not only the large backbone transmission upgrades, but also the transmission owners building interconnections for individual projects to connect breakers, transformers, and other equipment. Soholt said longer and longer component lead times presented timing challenges, which were also problematic for developers. These were all important takeaways from the CGA survey, and items the group will work to resolve.
Yet, for all the difficulties, Soholt seemed optimistic that MISO would continue to find ways to improve the process. “When we get overwhelmed, we really step back and say, ‘What’s going to be the best thing to work on to really make a difference?’ So far, that really has been the big things like transmission planning. We feel good about where that’s at in MISO—they are doing good long-range planning,” Soholt said.

Today, molten salt reactors (MSRs) are experiencing a resurgence of interest worldwide, with numerous companies and research institutions actively developing various designs. MSRs offer several potential advantages, including enhanced safety, reduced waste generation, and the ability to utilize thorium as a fuel source, as previously mentioned.
“There are several molten salt reactor companies that are in the process of cutting deals and getting MOIs [memorandums of intent] with foreign countries,” Mike Conley, author of the book Earth Is a Nuclear Planet: The Environmental Case for Nuclear Power, said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. Conley is a nuclear energy advocate and strong believer in MSR technology. He called MSRs “a far superior reactor technology” compared to light-water reactors (LWRs).
The thorium fuel cycle is a key component in at least some MSR designs. The thorium fuel cycle is the path that thorium transmutes through from fertile source fuel to uranium fuel ready for fission. Thorium-232 (Th-232) absorbs a neutron, transmuting it into Th-233. Th-233 beta decays to protactinium-233 (Pa-233), and finally undergoes a second beta minus decay to become uranium-233 (U-233). This is the one way of turning natural and abundant Th-232 into something fissionable. Since U-233 is not naturally found but makes an ideal nuclear reactor fuel, it is a much sought-after fuel cycle.
“The best way to do this is in a molten salt reactor, which is an incredible advance in reactor design. And the big thing is, whether you’re fueling a molten salt reactor with uranium or thorium or plutonium or whatever, it’s a far superior reactor technology. It absolutely cannot melt down under any circumstances whatsoever period,” said Conley.
Conley suggested that most of the concern people have about nuclear power revolves around the spread of radioactive material. Specifically, no matter how unlikely it is, if an accident occurred and contamination went airborne, the fact that it could spread beyond the plant boundary is worrisome to many people who oppose nuclear power. “The nice thing about a molten salt reactor is: if a molten salt reactor just goes belly up and breaks or gets destroyed or gets sabotaged, you’ll have a messed-up reactor room with a pancake of rock salt on the floor, but not a cloud of radioactive steam that’s going to go 100 miles downwind,” Conley explained.
And the price for an MSR could be much more attractive than the cost of currently available GW-scale LWR units. “The ThorCon company is predicting that they will be able to build for $1 a watt,” said Conley. “That’s one-fourteenth of what Vogtle was,” he added, referring to Southern Company’s nuclear expansion project in Georgia, which includes two Westinghouse AP1000 units. Of course, projections do not always align with reality, so MSR pilot projects will be keenly watched to validate claims.
There is progress being made on MSR projects. For example, in February 2022, TerraPower and Southern Company announced an agreement to design, construct, and operate the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment (MCRE)—the world’s first critical fast-spectrum salt reactor—at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). Since then, Southern Company reported successfully commencing pumped-salt operations in the Integrated Effects Test (IET), signifying a major achievement for the project. The IET is a non-nuclear, externally heated, 1-MW multiloop system, located at TerraPower’s laboratory in Everett, Washington. “The IET will inform the design, licensing, and operation of an approximately 180-MW MCFR [Molten Chloride Fast Reactor] demonstration planned for the early 2030s timeframe,” Southern Company said.

In mid-January, scientists who maintain the world’s temperature records announced that 2023 was the hottest year on record. NASA researchers say extreme weather across the planet, including heat extremes, wildfires, droughts, tropical cyclones, heavy precipitation, floods, high-tide flooding, and marine heat waves, will become more common and severe as the planet warms. That’s a big problem for power grids, because extreme weather often causes outages and damage to grid assets.
Michael Levy, U.S. Networks lead and Global Head of Asset Resilience at Baringa Partners, a global management consulting firm, is highly focused on extreme weather risks and developing plans to help mitigate the threats. He suggested accurately forecasting dollars of risk at the asset level from extreme weather events is very important to his clients.
“Every facility all across the U.S. is having a heightened awareness of some of these extreme weather events, and more importantly, how they can protect themselves and their customers against those in the future,” Levy said as a guest on The POWER Podcast.
“Utilities have always been really good, generally, at keeping the lights on and maintaining a fair level of reliability,” said Levy. “In general, they’re making the right investments—they have the right ambitions—but what’s challenging about these extreme weather events is that because they’re so infrequent at individual locations, and the impacts are so severe, what we find is that utility clients often are really challenged to estimate those high-impact, low-frequency events, and integrate them into their investment plans.”
However, Levy said advances in attribution climate science are helping utilities overcome some of the challenges. “Scientists are now able to associate, with reasonable level of accuracy, what increasing warming means physically for the rest of the world in terms of how the frequency and severity of these extreme weather events may change,” he explained.
“One of the big things that we focus on with our utility clients is converting those climate forecasts into dollars of risk, and that way, it gives them an adjustable baseline that they can substantiate spend against,” said Levy. “If you’re undergrounding lines to protect them against wildfire, elevating substations to protect them against flooding, all of those things cost money, and we’re increasingly seeing regulators—they want to see the benefits, they want to see that the money is being spent prudently. So, that’s what we’re talking to our clients about today,” he said.
And utilities have proven that sound planning does pay off. Levy pointed to actions taken in Florida following particularly active and intense hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005. Soon thereafter, the Florida Public Service Commission adopted extensive storm hardening initiatives. Wooden pole inspection and replacement programs were adopted, and vegetative remediation solutions were implemented, vastly improving grid reliability. Additionally, investor-owned electric utilities were ordered to file updated storm hardening plans for the commission to review every three years.
However, the proof is in the pudding, and for Florida, grid hardening has tasted very good. Levy compared the effects experienced from Hurricane Michael in 2018 to those of Hurricane Ian in 2022. “When Ian came, despite being a bigger and stronger hurricane, they had no transmission lines down, which, of course, are very costly and time intensive to replace, and they were able to restore customers three times as fast, despite having more customers out. So, they’re experiencing what we like to call at Baringa ‘the rewards of resilience,’ because investing in resilience is a fraction of restoration costs,” said Levy.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) explains that community solar, also known as shared solar or solar gardens, is a distributed solar energy deployment model that allows customers to buy or lease part of a larger, off-site shared solar photovoltaic (PV) system. It says community solar arrangements allow customers to enjoy advantages of solar energy without having to install their own solar energy system.
The U.S. Department of Energy says community solar customers typically subscribe to—or in some cases own—a portion of the energy generated by a solar array, and receive an electric bill credit for electricity generated by their share of the community solar system. It suggests community solar can be a great option for people who are unable to install solar panels on their roofs because they are renters, or because their roofs or electrical systems aren’t suited to solar.
The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) reports 6.5 GW of community solar capacity has been installed in the U.S. through the 1st quarter of 2024. Furthermore, SEIA predicts more than 6 GW of community solar capacity will be added over the next five years. It says 41 states, plus the District of Columbia, have at least one community solar project online.
“These programs are very attractive and provide a lot of benefit to a whole range of consumers,” Nate Owen, CEO and founder of Ampion, said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. Ampion currently manages distributed generation projects for developers in nine states, with new states being added as more programs become active.
“It’s fundamentally a different way of developing energy assets,” Owen said. “These things [community solar farms] are their own asset class. They produce a very significant value because they are generally located closer to load, and so, they fortify and strengthen local distribution networks quite a bit. And right now, they are very popular—there’s quite a bit of development going on in states across the country that have put programs in place.”
Owen specifically mentioned Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York as states with active community solar programs. “There’s a lot of activity going on in a lot of states right now,” he said.
According to Owen, community solar saves customers money. “The contract structure of community solar means that, ultimately, everybody’s guaranteed savings,” he said. “Nearly every community solar contract we’ve ever done has been provided at a percent off the value of the utility bill credit. So, at its essence, we are selling dollars’ worth of utility bill credits for 90 cents, and so, you automatically save money.”
Contract terms often vary from project to project and state to state. “I think residential customers these days are generally signing contracts that are at least a year, if not three or five in some cases,” explained Owen. He noted that some states, such as Maine and New York, have a statutory 90-day termination notice clause for residential customers, so it doesn’t really matter how long the term is because subscribers have the right to terminate deals when they choose. In such cases, Owen said the “replaceability feature” of community solar is vital to success. “We can drop a customer and replace them—and we do,” he said.

If you have paid any attention to nuclear power plant construction projects over the years, you know that there is a long history of cost overruns and schedule delays on many of them. In fact, many nuclear power plants that were planned in the 1960s and 1970s were never completed, even after millions (or billions) of dollars were spent on development. As POWER previously reported, by 1983, several factors including project management deficiencies prompted the delay or cancellation of more than 100 nuclear units planned in the U.S.—nearly 45% of total commercial capacity previously ordered.
Yet, at least one construction expert believes nuclear power plants can be built on time and on budget. “To me, nuclear should be far, far more competitive than it is,” Todd Zabelle, a 30-plus-year veteran of the construction industry and author of the book Built to Fail: Why Construction Projects Take So Long, Cost Too Much, and How to Fix It, said as a guest on The POWER Podcast.
Owners have a big role to play in the process. “The owner has to get educated on how to deliver these projects, because the owner gets the value out of any decisions that are made,” Zabelle said. “You cannot just hand it over to a construction management firm and hope for the best, or EPCM [engineering, procurement, construction, and management firm]. It’s just not going to work.”
“What it boils down to is a lot of people doing a lot of administrative work—people watching the people doing the technical work or the craft work—and we become an industry of bureaucracy and administration,” said Zabelle. “Everyone’s forgot about ‘How do we actually do the work?’ That has huge implications because of the disconnect between those two.”
According to Zabelle, the problem can be solved by implementing a production operations mentality. “My proposal in all this is: we need way more thinking about operations management, specifically operations science,” he said. “Not that it’s what happens after the asset’s delivered, but it’s actually a field of knowledge that assists with how to take inputs and make their outputs. The construction industry doesn’t understand anything about operations—they don’t understand the fundamentals.”
In Zabelle’s book, he provides a more thorough explanation of the concept. “Operations science is the study of how to improve and optimize processes and systems to achieve the desired objectives. It involves the use of mathematical models and other techniques to analyze and optimize systems,” he wrote. “It is used to improve efficiency and reduce costs, while ensuring that the quality of the output remains high. Operations science is used to improve the effectiveness of operations, while also reducing waste and improving customer satisfaction.”
Near the end of his book, Zabelle noted that the time for business as usual is rapidly closing. “The pain of the status quo in construction is going to increase exponentially as our capacity to develop and execute projects falls short of expectations,” he wrote. “Until we recognize projects as production systems and use operations science to drive project results, we are doomed to failure. We need to free ourselves from the prior eras and instead focus on a new era of project delivery, one in which projects will be highly efficient production systems that utilize the bounty of the technology (AI [artificial intelligence], robotics, data analytics, etc.) we are privileged to have access to.”
Zabelle sounded hopeful about the future of nuclear power construction. “I truly believe—I would actually throw down the gauntlet—we can make the Westinghouse AP1000 financially viable,” he said. “I’m happy to work with anybody on how to make nuclear competitive because I think it should be and could be.”

It seems everywhere you go, both inside and outside of the power industry, people are talking about hydrogen. Last October, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced an investment of $7 billion to launch seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs) across the nation and accelerate the commercial-scale deployment of “low-cost, clean hydrogen.” Hydrogen is undoubtedly a valuable energy product that can be produced with zero or near-zero carbon emissions using renewable energy and electrolyzers. The Biden administration says it “is crucial to meeting the President’s climate and energy security goals.”
“Hydrogen is one of the hottest topics in the energy transition conversation right now, and that’s because it really is a super versatile energy carrier. A lot of folks refer to it as ‘the Swiss Army knife of decarbonization,’ including our founder, Mr. Gates,” Robin Millican, senior director of U.S. Policy and Advocacy at Breakthrough Energy, said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. Breakthrough Energy is a network of entities and initiatives founded by Bill Gates, which include investment funds, philanthropic programs, and policy efforts linked by a common commitment to scale the technologies needed to achieve a path to net-zero emissions by 2050.
“If you think about the ways that you can use hydrogen, you can use it as a feedstock for industrial materials, you can combine it with CO2 to make electrofuels [also known as e-fuels], you can use it for grid balancing if you’re storing it and then deploying that hydrogen when it’s needed, so it can be used a lot of different ways, which is great,” Millican said. “But actually, to us, the more salient question that we should be asking ourselves is: you can use hydrogen in a lot of these different ways, but should you be using hydrogen in all of those different applications?”
Millican said there’s a simple framework that she uses to answer that question. “If there’s a way that you can electrify a process, in almost all cases, that’s going to be cheaper and more efficient from an energy conversion standpoint than using hydrogen,” she said.
Millican suggested electrification is a better option than hydrogen for most building and light-duty transportation applications. While noting that hydrogen could be a suitable option for aviation e-fuels, she said biofuels might be an even better fit. However, when it comes to fertilizers and ammonia, clean hydrogen is very likely the best pathway to reducing emissions in that particular sector, she said.
Breakthrough Energy isn’t the first group to think about hydrogen in this way. Millican noted that Michael Liebreich’s “Hydrogen Ladder” has been focusing on the best possible uses for hydrogen for years. According to Liebreich, hydrogen shouldn’t routinely be used in power systems to generate power because the cycle losses—going from power to green hydrogen, storing it, moving it around, and then using it to generate electricity—are too large. However, he says, “The standout use for clean hydrogen here is for long-term storage.”
Yet, Millican said there is a scenario where hydrogen could be extremely affordable at scale. She said “geologic hydrogen” is something Breakthrough Energy is very interested in. “There are companies out there that are working on identifying where hydrogen exists naturally in the subsurface, and then trying to extract that hydrogen, which could be super affordable, because again, it’s abundant in some areas,” she explained. “If we’re thinking about hydrogen in that scenario, we might want to use it a lot more ubiquitously.”