#or the financing incentives that *discourage* utilities from building lr improving transmission lines

[anonymusbosch]

here's a tech tidbit for the day. in large part, the US's current lack of green energy isn't because the tech doesn't exist or that the tech isn't cheap/competitive with fossil fuels - it's because of bureaucratic tangles and permitting delays. Right now it can take new power projects five full years just to get approved to connect to the power grid. (On average, it's taking 3.7 years).

As of the end of 2021, there was over a terawatt of green energy storage waiting to get approval to connect to the grid. That's more than all the energy currently generated in the US. For the most part, these aren't completed projects waiting to connect - they're projects that are ready to build waiting for approval before they break ground, or are partially built and getting their application in so that they're not waiting between construction and transmission. Many requests in the queue will never get built (some because they can't afford to wait in line for five years, or lose land rights, or have their interconnect denied, or require costly restudies after design changes, or for unrelated reasons) but even if the historical rate of 25% of them were to succeed, that's still hundreds of gigawatts of power and enough to more-than-replace all the coal plants in the US.

That's not the only obstacle to construction (see also: transmission capacity, load balancing, environmental studies, permitting, and a host of other factors). To be clear: waving a magic wand and lifting this particular barrier wouldn't mean green energy right away forever. But this problem is a decent representative of the type of obstacle green energy faces. Generation and transmission of energy are - largely - cheap and efficient. Getting systems approved and integrated across a morass of local, state, and federal governments, utility companies, and ISOs? Slow and hard.