A new study finds that existing U.S. power plants could support nearly 600 gigawatts of additional clean energy by 2030 using existing grid connections.
Build a new power plant in the United States today and you’ll wait a median of five to six years to connect it to the grid. Then you’ll pay for the upgrades.
The wires leading out of the plants that already exist, meanwhile, carry far less than they could.
A gas peaker plant runs a few percent of the hours in a year. The average solar farm uses about a quarter of its connection.
Put new solar panels, wind turbines and batteries on the land around those plants and feed them through the same connection.
Done that way, the country’s fossil plants alone could host about 600 gigawatts of clean power by 2030 using existing grid connections.
That is the estimate from a team at the University of California, Berkeley, who screened the land around 3,890 existing power plants from satellite images.
The figure is a ceiling, not a forecast. It assumes a plant’s owner can share the connection, which federal rules allow but few grid operators have made routine.
And it leaves out the contracts and operating limits that bind many plants.
Umed Paliwal of Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy ran the analysis with Emilia Chojkiewicz and Duncan Callaway of the Energy and Resources Group and Amol Phadke.
Their starting point is a mismatch. Peak electricity demand is projected to rise 15% to 25% by 2030, pushed by data centers for AI, returning factories and electrification.
Meanwhile, a new gas turbine takes four to six years to arrive, and a large transformer two to four.
The connection point of an existing plant is already built. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission lets new generators share any unused portion of it, a practice the industry calls surplus interconnection.
The paper counts how much could fit without ever sending more power down the line than the original plant’s own capacity.
Around each of 1,403 fossil plants and 2,487 wind and solar farms, the team drew a 12-by-12-mile (20-by-20-kilometer) square.
Every 100-by-100-foot (30-by-30-meter) parcel inside it was checked against more than 50 rules developers use, from slope and land cover to protected status.
Most sites passed easily. Nearly 90% of the fossil plants and 76% of the renewable ones had room for more than five times their connection capacity.
Room isn’t the same as money. For each fossil unit, the team compared the cost of running it, mostly fuel, against the projected cost of new solar or wind built next to it.
In 2024, solar was already cheaper at 60% of the country’s 4,643 fossil units, and wind at 53%.
Limiting the additions to what each connection can carry, the economically viable total came to 412 gigawatts in 2024.
The total rises to 507 by 2027 and 597 by 2030 as renewable costs fall.
That would represent several times the generating capacity needed to match the country’s projected increase in peak electricity demand, although not all of that power would be available at once.
More than 200 gigawatts of that sits in the PJM and MISO regions, which cover the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest.
The calculation uses no federal tax credits, which expire in 2026. With them, the total would reach 977 gigawatts.
Fuel prices move the answer a lot. With expensive gas, the 2030 figure rises past 800 gigawatts.
With low-cost gas, it falls to about 250. A solar-only version, reflecting the slump in new wind projects, yields 404 gigawatts.
At a solar or wind farm, the question is different, because there’s no fuel to beat. Instead, a battery that can discharge for six hours lets the site deliver power on demand, the way a gas plant does.
In the PJM region, grid planners credit a six-hour battery with 58% of its rating toward reliability, against 60% for a gas turbine.
Add such a battery to every existing renewable plant, sized to the plant’s capacity, and the sites could absorb 324 gigawatts of new solar and 128 gigawatts of wind.
Together they would deliver 260 gigawatts of firm capacity. Firm, in grid terms, means power that can be called on at the evening peak rather than only when the wind blows.
That would take about 1,530 gigawatt-hours of batteries, 50 times what is paired with renewables today. The authors note that battery supply chains are one of the limits on that figure.
Texas’s ERCOT grid could add more than 60 gigawatts this way and MISO nearly 44.
In Texas, the Plains and the Midwest, the total exceeds the peak demand growth projected for each by 2030. The connection at a typical solar farm would go from 30% used to 71%.
Skipping the queue avoids more than time. Connection costs for projects finished between 2019 and 2023 averaged $81 per kilowatt and reached $250 in some regions.
The team puts the avoided cost at up to $51 billion at fossil sites and $109 billion at renewable sites. The catch is in the fine print.
FERC’s Order 845 made connection sharing possible, but each grid operator handles it differently.
A battery sharing a wind farm’s connection may be counted as energy only, with no credit for meeting peak demand.
The authors call for standard rules, fixed study timelines and a way to pass connection rights along when the original plant retires.
The 597-gigawatt figure ignores the capacity contracts and ramping limits that bind many fossil plants, so it overstates what any one site could do.
Fuel costs, the key input in the whole comparison, are commercially confidential, so the comparison rests on estimates.
The study also doesn’t model the transmission bottlenecks that could stop power from one plant’s connection reaching the customers who need it. Nor does it calculate the emissions avoided.
The next step the authors describe is power-flow modeling on real grids, to find out how much of this spare capacity the wider grid can actually absorb.
The full study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
—–
Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.
Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.
—–

source