Video Transcript

More Than 2 Terawatts Are Waiting to Connect to the Grid

There’s a statistic every leader in the power industry, whether an investor, buyer, or seller, should take notice of.

According to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, at the end of 2025, more than 2,000 gigawatts of proposed generation and storage were actively seeking connections to the grid.

That’s more than two terawatts, or, put into monetary terms, something like $1.25 trillion.

The Interconnection Queue Is an Economic Signal

This long interconnection queue isn’t just an engineering matter. It’s really an economic signal.

It’s telling us that access to generation and transmission capacity in certain locations is scarce. And we all know scarce things have value.

Now imagine you’re operating a facility that can install a battery, generator, solar, or has flexible load.

If producing or reducing one megawatt at that location allows you to avoid expensive peaks, improve resilience, or potentially relieve a grid constraint, that megawatt may be worth considerably more than simply the retail value of the electricity it produces or stores.

In most cases, it is.

Kilowatt-Hour Savings Don’t Tell the Whole Story

That’s why evaluating distributed energy based purely on kilowatt-hour savings can miss much of the opportunity.

So here’s my take.

Until we prioritize what we can do behind the meter, with its inherent advantages to serve load, enhance local resilience, and reduce the delivered cost of power, we are not truly serious about addressing both resilience issues and the impact on customers.

We Need to Think Differently About Distributed Energy

This current emphasis by many policymakers looks like more of the same as we have seen over the last hundred years, only with less carbon-intensive technologies.

Well, I hope you like my hot take. Goes along with the weather.

Stay cool, everybody.