Adequate for a Summer That No Longer Exists
On May 18, the grid operator serving 65 million people across thirteen states needed a federal emergency order to avoid rolling blackouts. Temperatures hit the nineties in mid-May while 40,400 megawatts of generation sat offline for scheduled maintenance. Scheduled correctly, according to a calendar that no longer describes the weather. The next day, the national reliability authority declared the same grid adequate for summer. Both findings were accurate. They measured different things, against different assumptions about what "normal" looks like. The distance between those two numbers is where people get hurt.
Adequate for a Summer That No Longer Exists
On May 18, the grid operator serving 65 million people across thirteen states needed a federal emergency order to avoid rolling blackouts. Temperatures hit the nineties in mid-May while 40,400 megawatts of generation sat offline for scheduled maintenance. Scheduled correctly, according to a calendar that no longer describes the weather. The next day, the national reliability authority declared the same grid adequate for summer. Both findings were accurate. They measured different things, against different assumptions about what "normal" looks like. The distance between those two numbers is where people get hurt.
The Blocked Fix
Roughly 2,600 gigawatts of generation capacity sit in the interconnection queue. That is more than double what the entire US grid produces today. The median project waits nearly five years to connect. Close to 80 percent withdraw before they get there.
Projects that survive the queue hit a physical wall. Transformer demand is up 116 percent since 2019, with lead times stretching to four years and prices running four to six times their 2022 levels. Eighty percent of power transformer supply is imported. Nearly $2 billion has been committed to new North American factory capacity. None of it comes online before 2028.
