858 GWdc of solar and over 1 TWh of batteries are in development
Author: John Fitzgerald Weaver
The US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Electricity Markets and Policy group (EMP) has released their annual power grid queue update. The nation’s queue holds over 1 TWac of generation capacity. The new capacity added to the queue this year exceeds 600 GWac and comes from more than 3,000 unique projects. Solar photovoltaics in the queue totals 676 GWac/~845 GWdc of capacity at the end of 2021. 85% of the new capacity came from solar plus energy storage facilities. Solar coupled with energy storage now totals more than 285 GWac of capacity in the queue. Essentially, the utility scale California solar power market is now a solar plus storage market. In total, there is more than 400 GW of energy storage capacity in the queue.