Interconnection: Renewable Energy USA

Welcome to Megawatt Recruitment’s monthly newsletter to keep you connected to what’s going on in the renewable energy industry in the United States and provide more insight, knowledge, and connection to the people and companies who drive our industry.

What People Are Talking About

• BOEM issued the Record of Decision approving Orsted’s Ocean Wind 1 project off the coast of New Jersey.
• The Massachusetts (MA) Energy Siting Facilities Board approved 800MWh of energy storage through the Cranberry Point Energy Storage and Medway Grid projects which will allow MA to meet 80% of its ESS goal by 2025.
• BEOM published the Notice of Availability for the Final EIS for Revolution Wind (Orsted & Eversource Energy) on July 21st recommending fewer turbines. The next step will be a Record of Decision.
• Rhode Island Energy rejected Orsted & Eversource’s PPA proposal for Revolution Wind 2 citing lack of energy cost savings for consumers.
• The Acadia, the first U.S flagged subsea rock installation vessel, officially commenced construction.
• Bravo Infrastructure Group merged Radiance Solar, a top C&I EPC, and Sunshine Solar, the 2nd largest C&I installer in the US. 
• RWE Clean Energy signed 8 PPAs with Dominion Energy for 7 utility-scale solar projects in Virginia totaling 300+MW. 
• Hawthorne Renewables, a utility-scale solar developer, to open Phoenix office with $250M investment from French private equity firm Omnes Capital.
• First Solar investing $1.1 billion to build 5th U.S. manufacturing facility expected to add 3.5GW of annual production capacity upon opening in 2026 to their 14GW capacity already in the U.S.
• The Pacific Northwest will add 6GW of transmission capacity between 2025 and 2032 through federally owned Bonneville Power Administration in Washington and Oregon to help accommodate the queue of over 70GW of projects in the interconnection application process.
• Form Energy is building a manufacturing plant in West Virginia to build commercial-scale Iron-Air batteries which could reach 100 hours of storage; and Minnesota approved Form Energy to build a 10MW/1000MWh iron-air storage pilot project to be operational by 2025 for Xcel Energy.

Recent Personnel Moves and Promotions

• Spearmint Energy welcome a new CFO, Cory Magnuson, from BrightNight Energy; Chief People Officer, Loraine Farberg, from Kindred Partners; and SVP of Strategy and Project Development, Gina Wolf, from Meta.
• Equinor promoted Aude Schwarzkopf from Commercial Director of Beacon Wind to Head of Asset Development.
• Joining Beca, a project advisory firm, as Principal for Renewables, is Khalid Simjee, formerly Director of Project Management at The AES Corporation.
• Crowley Wind Services gained a new VP of Offshore Wind Project Management with the addition of Mark Coplen, formerly President of Ventolines.
• Moving from Summer Energy to Competitive Power Ventures, Kelli Mitchell, is now VP of Retail Operations.
• Madison Energy Investments promoted Shivapriya Balasubramanian from Director of Valuations and Analysis to Vice President of Investment.
• National Grid lured away Robert Galgano from Avangrid where he was Lead for Offshore Wind Engineering to become their manager of High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) Development.
• Illuminate USA welcomed Frank Zhu as General Manager, formerly CEO of GCL Solar.
• Eric Thumma, formerly with Avangrid, joined Corio Generation as Head of U.S.
• Joining Aera Energy, a California-based E&P as Chief Carbon Solutions officer is Randy Hoyle, formerly Chief Development Officer of Terra-Gen LLC.
• Green hydrogen company, Bloom Energy, prepares for new markets with the addition of James Roth as SVP of Global Government Affairs and Policy and Brian Vanderbloemen as VP of Government Affairs and Policy for Federal Efforts.
• Former Navy Commanding Officer, Rich Massie, joined green hydrogen company Ohmium as VP of Safety and Sustainability.
• Enercon Services went on a hiring spree adding Jeal Paul Rivas as Principal I&C Engineer, Ryan Frizzell as Supervisor for Distribution Engineering, Mylon Nelson as Senior Electrical Engineer for EV Charging, William Rorech as Senior Electrical Engineer, and Brian Fitzgerald as Electrical Engineer.
• Shashwat Shekhar joined Apex Clean Energy as Interconnection Manager while Origis Energy welcomed their own Manager of Transmission, Grid Analysis and Interconnection, Pratiksha Tiwari.

What the market is talking about: Alleviating Grid Backlog

Despite high demand for renewable energy, the median duration from interconnection request to commercial operation has risen from about 18 months in 2005 to nearly 60 months in 2022.  Why?  And more importantly, what do we do about it?

It is difficult to have a conversation with anyone these days about renewable energy project development without discussing the backlog at the grid.  According to a report published by the Berkeley Lab in April 2023 and interpreted by Utility Dive, there were 10,200 projects totaling more than 1,350GW of generation and 680GW of energy storage projects waiting for interconnection approval when the year ended in 2022. 

To put this into perspective, according to the American Clean Power Association, 32GW of renewable energy capacity was added to the US grid in 2022.  If we were to continue adding only 32GW per year, it would take us over 40 years to build the 1,350GW of generation that is in the interconnection pipeline. 

Statistically speaking, only around 20% of what is put into the queue is ever actually built and connected to the grid, and that is one problem that needs to be addressed.  This issue is already in the purview of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the FERC, who issued a final ruling at the end of July to help alleviate some of the issues. 

To discourage speculative applications, the FERC will require customers applying for interconnection studies to pay a deposit for the feasibility study, a higher deposit for the system impact study, and a final deposit when executing the facilities study agreement with only a portion of the total deposit refundable and subject to a withdrawal penalty. 

On the other side of the table, the FERC’s rule requires all public utilities to adopt revised pro forma generator interconnection procedures and agreements with uniform modeling standards.  It will also impose penalties on transmission providers who fail to complete the studies on time.

To further reduce the burden on a finite number of employees who are qualified to review interconnection studies, the FERC will compel a “cluster study” approach on transmission providers to look at the total effect of multiple power generation projects coming online rather than an individual study per project.

Finally, the rule also prevents transmission providers from automatically rejecting or requiring multiple applications for generating facilities that will occupy the same site, for example a hybrid wind and solar plus storage project or a solar array on top of the reservoir of a hydropower plant.  The FERC basically requires that only one application be sent per interconnection point, a welcome change.

There are other details of the FERC ruling that are worthy of praise as well, but to keep this newsletter within reason, we will stop here.  Megawatt Recruitment would love to hear thoughts from the community on these changes and how they will affect your development process or timelines, if at all.

Talent Acquisition Insights: The Need for Speed

With the IRA pumping funds into renewable energy project development, companies across the industry are planning for more work and hence, the need for more hands to carry the load.  This means there is ample competition for candidates across all jobs supporting the early stages of renewable energy project development.  We are seeing that hiring managers who streamline their hiring processes and have all onboarding documentation ready to go are the ones most successful at capturing talent from this finite pool.

Long gone are the days of 5+ rounds of interviews with individual team members followed by a psychometric assessment and weeks of waiting for a decision.  Instead, we are seeing interview processes shorted with some employers even consolidating their interview process into a single interview with multiple members of the company.

With the differences in offers often being razor thin (for example: same compensation, work location, etc, but one employer has gotten back to the candidate on what the 401k matching program looks like while the other is still thinking about whether the candidate will be eligible for 401k matching before or after their probationary period), employers are missing out on good talent when they are not nimble enough to adjust to changing market dynamics and competitive practices.

Candidates are also often being presented with multiple offers (not just two, but frequently between three to five) to choose from and are coming under pressure to make a decision quickly.  Thus, it is important for prospective employers to keep engaged with candidates throughout the interview, offer, and onboarding processes and to be aware of what other offers may be on the table on when the candidate’s deadlines are to respond to other offers either through the recruiter or directly with the candidate.

Megawatt Recruitment is here to help our clients avoid pitfalls in hiring and to make our clients as competitive as possible in the market.  For candidates, we are here to help our candidates fill in the gaps to make educated decisions about career choices.

Thank you for joining us for another issue of Interconnection: Renewable Energy USA. We hope you enjoyed it and we look forward to keeping in touch and exchanging ideas, insights, and opinions. If you are a company considering hiring, we welcome the opportunity to present our services and capabilities. If you are a candidate, please check our jobs page or reach out to us to discuss your background, skills, and future aspirations.

 [ in-ter-kuh-nek-shuhn ]

noun

       the fact or state of being connected or linked with one another