Fortunately, the same kinds of upgrades that expand capacity for community solar also improve customer reliability and provide headroom for growing electrical loads.
“We’re also improving the substations, adding new capacity, adding new transformers and feeders, making the system more robust,” Freeman said. “We developed a very rigorous algorithm to calculate the reliability benefits,” which ended up showing a roughly 50–50 split in the benefits between customers and solar developers. “That went a long way toward convincing regulators that the cost-allocation principle would work.”
To be clear, there are significant risks to committing utility customers’ money to building out grid infrastructure to serve the needs of community solar projects. In Massachusetts, the state Attorney General’s Office is tasked with protecting utility customers’ interests in regulatory proceedings like these.
A senior official at the Attorney General’s Office who was involved with the CIP process told Canary Media that the office “took serious issue” with how Eversource first proposed splitting grid-upgrade costs. “Not only were ratepayers paying more than they should have, it created a lot of risk for ratepayers,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to discuss matters outside the official regulatory process.
On the other hand, the official said, “being able to have more homegrown generation is going to be important for Massachusetts. It is a cost risk. But how do we minimize those cost risks to ratepayers, and maximize those benefits to ratepayers, as we bring this solar online?”
These concerns from the Attorney General’s Office pushed the finalized version of CIP to shift more of the cost of new grid investments onto community solar projects as opposed to utility customers. That’s not ideal from the perspective of solar developers, obviously, but it’s far better than being stuck with the unaffordable upgrade costs they faced before.
Having a known per-kilowatt cost locked in well in advance is also helpful, said Mike Judge, currently undersecretary of energy for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, who spoke to Canary Media in 2023 when he was vice president of policy for the trade group Coalition for Community Solar Access.
Developers often need to secure interconnection rights before they can secure the financing and start signing up subscribers that allow them to move forward with projects, he said.
“There’s so much value for a developer to know I’m going to pay $370 a kilowatt to connect,” Judge said. “You’re not waiting a year, year and a half for a utility to come back with study results to say, it’s $5 million — and you have to cancel your project.”
From reactive to proactive
The model that Eversource established for the Marion-Fairhaven project is largely mirrored in the 10 other CIPs that it and National Grid have submitted to regulators. All told, Eversource has identified six groups with more than 250 MW of community solar or battery storage capacity. Porcaro said that National Grid has five CIPs that will enable about 300 MW of new projects — “that’s huge.”
Massachusetts isn’t the only state working on policies that aim to spur grid expansion while keeping customers’ power costs in check, Tohme said. Similar efforts are now underway in states including California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, and New York.
But to Tohme’s knowledge, no other state has accomplished what Massachusetts has with its CIP structure. New York is closest, she said, with a cost-sharing framework that allows community solar developers to split up the costs of necessary upgrades rather than bearing them alone. But that still doesn’t include the same “build in advance, pay later” structure that the CIPs have, she said.
At the same time, Tohme pointed out, the CIPs remain a response to a problem that’s been hounding the state for years now: projects stuck behind an inadequately upgraded grid. The next logical step is to figure out where grid upgrades should be made before that kind of situation happens again.
That’s one of the goals laid out for the state’s three major investor-owned utilities under a sprawling grid-modernization mandate created as part of a major energy and climate law passed in 2022. It’s called the Electric Sector Modernization Plans process, and the Department of Public Utilities is now reviewing the proposals submitted by utilities last year to determine next steps, Porcaro said.
CIPs are a part of that broader plan, he said. But the modernization plans are “going above that and saying, ‘plan for everything’ — for everyone having an EV, and electrifying their homes, and specific goals for how much energy storage we need. It’s a tall order.”
Given how long it took to figure out CIPs, clean energy developers have reason to worry that this even more sweeping and complicated planning task could take even longer. Clean-energy industry group Advanced Energy United has urged state regulators to keep doing CIPs while it undertakes this broader new effort.
Porcaro highlighted other work that can help get more clean energy connected even before the grid gets built out. He pointed to National Grid’s Active Resource Integration pilot, launching this year, which is looking at ways community solar and battery projects can connect to grids that can safely absorb their power output during all but a handful of hours of the year. If those solar farms can curtail their output during those hours, they could connect years ahead of utility grid upgrades.
These kinds of “flexible interconnection” structures, as they’re generally known, could help “get us through now to when the full system could be built, or to get through certain areas where you don’t need a full buildout,” Porcaro said.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on building out a grid that can support Massachusetts’ clean energy and electrification ambitions. Later this year, the Department of Public Utilities is expected to issue its ground rules on how utilities should start to calculate the fair sharing of costs between their customers and the community solar and battery projects trying to connect to their grids under the Electric Sector Modernization Plans, Tohme said.
Once that’s done, utilities and other stakeholder groups will bring cost-sharing proposals to the regulator and start to hash them out, she said. ”So we have a long way to go before we have proactive proposals.”
But just because it’s going to be hard doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing, she said. “We have to modernize our grid. Right now we’re doing it anyway — we’re just reacting. We’re just doing it non-strategically. And that’s just as expensive,” Tohme said — if not more so.
