Every renewable project is built around one number — its consented export limit — and most of that hard-won, fully paid-for capacity sits idle for all but a few hours a year. FERC's Surplus Interconnection Service now lets a complementary generator use that headroom without joining the queue for a new connection. This whitepaper sets out a simple, transparent screen for ranking which sites are worth it, cheap enough to sweep thousands at once.
The number every project is built around
Every renewable project is built around a single number: the export limit its grid connection is consented to. Solar and wind reach that limit only for a few hours a year, so for much of the year a large share of hard-won, fully paid-for interconnection capacity sits idle. That idle capacity is stranded infrastructure — and United States interconnection reform, through FERC’s Surplus Interconnection Service, now lets a complementary generator use it without joining the multi-year queue for a new connection.
A first-pass screen for stranded capacity
The hard part is knowing where it is worth doing. This whitepaper sets out a deliberately simple way to measure the spare export capacity a site leaves on the table and to rank candidate sites by it, cheaply enough to sweep thousands of locations at once. It is transparent enough to explain to a chief financial officer and precise enough to defend to an engineer: no black-box optimiser, just the headroom, the fuel access, a feasibility gate, and a clean rule for sizing the unit that fills it.
What it isn’t
It is also honest about what it is: a first-pass screen, the entry point to a deeper programme of dispatch, price, and network modelling rather than a substitute for it. The paper carries a worked example, a validation against the exact dispatch optimum, and a frank account of where the method stops.
The full methodology is documented in the whitepaper. Download here (PDF) →
Where it stops — and where the harder work begins
This screen deliberately stops at ranking sites. It leaves aside the harder question of when that headroom is worth dispatching against volatile prices. For that next rung, see Dr Stuart Woolley’s A Dam Builder’s Yardstick in the Lone Star State, which applies the Hurst exponent to ERCOT prices.