Grid Talk: PJM’s Massive Grid Evolution

“You have a renewed interest in renewables such as wind, solar, and batteries wanting to interconnect to our grid.” 

Kenneth Seiler, Vice President, PJM Interconnection

The electric grid in America’s northeast industrial heartland, touching 65 million customers, is in the midst of profound transformation, according to Kenneth Seiler vice president for PJM Interconnection. Seiler recently sat down with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Talk podcast to talk about how the electric system is rapidly evolving from Illinois to New Jersey.

PJM is currently evaluating 2,700 new major grid related projects. “We just went through the interconnection reform process to get those most-ready projects out the door,” Seiler told Grid Talk. “We’re performing additional automation with our toolsets. We’re hiring additional people, and we’re bringing in the best and the brightest that we can get, including folks fresh out of school. “There’s a lot of energy being put on this right now to address any number of these issues whether it’s the queue reform and the bottlenecks that we’re experiencing based on the volumes we’ve been seeing; whether it’s supply chain issues; whether it’s the financing; whether it’s local opposition.”

Within PJM there are 1,500 generation units touched by the transmission grid. “With the amount of renewables that we’re seeing with solar and wind and storage facilities, that number will increase greatly,” Seiler said. 

“I don’t know what that number will be in the next five years but I will tell you that a lot of the people who are looking to build solar panels and solar farms right now are looking to interconnect at the same exact spot where we have a retired fossil unit,” he said. “We’re also going to see an influx of solar panels on top of people’s homes as the supply chain issues loosen up so that’s going to require us to get much more intimate and have much more visibility with the distribution systems and with the various distribution utilities that are out there,” Seiler said