Costs and delays related to upgrading transmission infrastructure are blocking new power sources from getting onto the grid in Virginia, according to a new analysis.
The nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council looked at data from PJM, an organization that oversees the electric grid in 13 states and Washington, D.C.
It found that 103 power plants in Virginia have withdrawn or been significantly delayed by network upgrade bottlenecks since 2018, mostly clean energy projects.
The issue is expected to prevent Dominion Energy’s offshore wind farm, for example, from delivering its full capacity for several more years.
At the same time, power demand has skyrocketed and is projected to continue rising, driven largely by data centers that use huge amounts of electricity to run 24/7.
“We desperately need new power plants to be able to supply power to the grid,” said Claire Lang-Ree, a sustainable energy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Without these new power plants, consumers are paying high prices for energy because we're seeing demand outstrip supply.”
The imbalance also threatens energy reliability, meaning Virginians could see an increased risk of blackouts starting next year, she said.
PJM, which is the largest regional transmission organization in the U.S., operates like “air traffic control” for electricity. It predicts supply and demand and manages how power flows through the system.
The operator has a notoriously long process for reviewing energy projects trying to connect to the grid, which has drawn a lot of attention in recent years.
But for the new analysis, Lang-Ree said the nonprofit wanted to focus on what happens afterward.
When evaluating a project, PJM often identifies spots where adding that amount of energy to the grid requires improving infrastructure, such as new or revamped transmission lines and substations to handle higher voltage.
The developer or utility behind the project is then responsible for paying for the upgrades before they can bring a project online.
“It would be like if we had a brand new high-speed train that's constructed and ready to go, and then we find out that the rails underneath can't support it because they're cracked and outdated,” Lang-Ree said. “So even though everyone wants it, and it'll be cheaper and faster, it is stuck behind building the entire rail system again.”
The regional grid was built over the last century, and many aspects haven’t been upgraded in a long time, she said.
“It's almost like the technology of new power plants is outpacing the ability of the underlying grid to keep up.”
The average cost of network upgrades associated with withdrawn projects in Virginia is about $10.4 million, according to the report.
Those projects would have created about 5,000 megawatts of power, or enough to power the equivalent of more than a million homes. Another 4,000 megawatts are delayed until 2030.
Only the utilities that operate the local transmission system, such as Dominion, can physically handle conducting the upgrades.
Virginia is unique in that Dominion is often the builder of a project and the entity responsible for carrying out updates, Lang-Ree said. That makes it somewhat “perplexing” that the issue is blocking so many projects here.
Most affected over the past near-decade were solar and battery storage, which accounted for a majority of PJM’s interconnection queue at the time, with fewer fossil fuel units being proposed. (This week, however, the group announced its newest round of projects entering the queue, and natural gas accounts for almost half.)
Lang-Ree said she hopes PJM and state regulators will start investigating what’s causing delays and how to get around them.
There are potential solutions. Newer technologies for power lines and software can make infrastructure more efficient, for example.
Officials could also explore ways to share the cost of paying for upgrades.
In 2024, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered all regional grid operators, including PJM, to do more holistic long-term transmission planning.
It “changes the paradigm,” Lang-Ree said, from charging the companies that bring energy online to allocating costs based on the benefits those projects provide.
“It’ll hopefully encompass some of these most dramatic problem areas where we really desperately need to see those transmission lines and infrastructure built.”
Meanwhile, Gov. Abigail Spanberger and seven other governors recently started pushing PJM to help shield households from paying for increased demand driven by data centers.
