MAINE MONITOR • August 30, 2024
The U.S. added a record amount of energy from solar, wind and batteries to the grid last year – around 40 gigawatts. Another 63 gigawatts are planned for this year. But an analysis suggests that won’t be enough to meet our emissions reduction targets, which will require adding roughly 70 to 126 gigawatts of renewable electricity capacity each year between 2025 and 2030. If we don’t make it easier to build large infrastructure projects, particularly the transmission lines that are currently one of the primary hurdles to adding renewables to the grid, the analysts wrote, we likely won’t meet those goals. “The biggest barriers to deployment between now and 2030 are non-cost in nature—like siting and permitting delays, backlogged grid interconnect queues, and supply chain challenges.”