Diana Digangi

“That missing money has to come from somewhere to make the project pencil, and that will likely be through PPA prices,” said Josh Price, director of intelligence and research at Crux.

74% of all new clean electricity capacity that would have been added under the Inflation Reduction Act will be preserved despite Trump administration policy changes, the report estimates, including 82% of utility-scale solar generation.

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Tony Smith, chair of the Virginia Distributed Solar Alliance, told Utility Dive that other states can learn from New York’s policies that “reduce soft costs, provide investment certainty, and remove utility-specific interconnection barriers.”

“There is no debate that voltage and frequency excursions on the transmission network create reliability concerns, which increase with the interconnection of each new large computational load,” wrote a PUC staffer.

The report estimates 74% of all new clean electricity capacity will be preserved, including 82% of utility-scale solar generation.

Data centers willl now have to provide annual energy usage reports to the state, and the PJM Interconnection will need to give state regulators additional insight into its demand forecasting.

Consistent incentives, standardized utility processes and regulatory collaboration are key to rapid growth, experts say.

“Regardless of the cost allocation methodology that is chosen, there remains a glaring cross-class subsidization occurring to the benefit of new [large load] customers,” said State Corporation Commission attorney Andrew Major.

Utility-scale solar’s levelized cost of electricity ranges between $40/MWh and $98/MWh, while combined cycle gas ranges between $51/MWh and $129/MWh, said a report from Lazard.