We need more of everything to power electrification. Data shows it’s getting harder to build anything.

A new survey from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory highlights the increasingly difficult landscape for bringing new wind and solar projects online, much like their conventional peers. Even as conventional resources like natural gas are rapidly being pushed into retirement by policy choices, developers are facing extraordinary challenges in developing the renewable resources that are supposed to replace them.

 When researchers surveyed developers of utility-scale wind and solar projects, they found at least 30% of projects were canceled and over 40% of projects faced delays of 6 months or longer. Among the reasons cited for both solar and wind project cancellations and delays were the grid interconnection queue, zoning problems, and community opposition. Of the respondents who provided data on recent project delays, 49% cited that those delays occurred during the permitting phase. In addition, community opposition was found to cause an average delay of 11 months for solar projects and 14 months for wind projects. 

 This survey confirms what many energy experts have long concluded: retiring existing plants on the assumption that new resources will always be available in time to fill the gap is simply not realistic.

 As the economy electrifies, the electric grid will need more of everything—more renewable resources and more conventional ones like natural gas to support reliability. But the same obstacles that have made it nearly impossible to develop new gas pipelines and other critical infrastructure have officially come for the renewables space.

 Byzantine permitting rules, endless litigation, and activist opposition have built a system where all energy projects, both conventional and renewables, struggle to get built at all while delays add costs that are ultimately paid by American consumers. Older conventional plants continue to be forced into early retirements and there simply will not be enough gigawatts of new resources available to replace them if we can’t build faster than ever before. And there is no reason to be optimistic that the pace will accelerate in the current environment.

 This is only further pushing us towards a reliability crisis.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chair Willie Phillips said it well when he responded to leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who have expressed concerns about the rapid pace of retirements. “We cannot, as a country, afford to retire resources on which we depend for reliability without ensuring that they are replaced with sufficient resources to meet resource adequacy and other system needs.”