Here’s a thought experiment. You’re a seasoned clean energy developer. You’ve got a pipeline of projects. You’ve navigated permitting, secured financing, refined your technology stack. Everything’s lined up, and you’re ready to build. There’s just one problem: interconnection.

To connect your projects, you have to go through a complex study process run by your utility, or your Regional Transmission Organization (RTO), or your Independent System Operator (ISO). They need to evaluate how your project impacts the grid, what upgrades are required, and how the costs get assigned. It’s a system built for a different grid era, and today, the system is completely overwhelmed.

For both developers and transmission providers, the interconnection queue has become a major obstacle. Developers depend on timely approvals to move projects forward. Transmission providers, meanwhile, are inundated with requests while also trying to maintain grid reliability, plan for future capacity, and, in many regions, meet aggressive decarbonization goals. And they’re doing all of that with legacy software that was never built to handle this kind of volume or complexity.

If you’ve been in the energy world for a while, you know this bottleneck well. But if you’re new, here’s the scale of the challenge: around 2.5 terawatts of renewable energy projects alone are currently stuck in interconnection queues across the U.S. At the same time, electricity demand is surging, driven by data centers, AI, EVs, and industrial electrification. The average wait time for grid interconnection in the U.S. is 6 years.

Speeding up the interconnection study process could remove one of the most significant barriers to getting clean energy and storage projects online. But that requires smarter, modern tools. Our guest today, David Bromberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Pearl Street Technologies, has built those tools, and is helping transmission providers and developers navigate the interconnection process with unprecedented speed.

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Hour 3 - Kelvin Sampson