Some of What’s Arriving on the System Is Already Able to Help
Sheri Givens is President and CEO of the Smart Electric Power Alliance.
Almost every conversation I’m part of these days begins with a number. A gigawatt figure, a load forecast, an interconnection queue that has doubled since last year. The numbers are real, and they are large. But I’ve noticed that we let the size of the challenge dictate the shape of the conversation, and that the shape has become almost entirely defensive.
How do we serve all this load? How do we pay for it? How do we keep it from landing on the customers already on the system? Those are foundational questions, and they are the right ones to be asking. But they are not the only ones.
Utilities have always managed growth. That is not the new part. What’s new is the speed and the concentration — a single request that arrives larger than a mid-size city, on a timeline measured in months rather than years.