That means if a developer wants to build a new wind farm, it might have to pay not just for a simple connecting line, but also for deeper grid upgrades elsewhere. One planned wind farm in North Dakota, for example, was asked to pay for multimillion-dollar upgrades to transmission lines hundreds of miles away in Nebraska and Missouri.
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It also creates perverse incentives, experts said. Some developers will submit multiple proposals for wind and solar farms at different locations without intending to build them all. Instead, they hope that one of their proposals will come after another developer who has to pay for major network upgrades. The rise of this sort of speculative bidding has further jammed up the queue.
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That creates a new problem: When a proposed energy project drops out of the queue, the grid operator often has to redo studies for other pending projects and shift costs to other developers, which can trigger more cancellations and delays.
