电网连接成本是建设新一代的障碍：证据和输电政策的启示（英）

Obstacles to Energy Infrastructure Project Sarah Johnston, Yifei Liu, and Chenyu Yang About the Authors Sarah Johnstonis an associate professor in the Department of Economics at theUniversity of Calgary. Johnston’s research interests include industrial organization andenergy and environmental economics. Yifei Liuis a PhD candidate in Agricultural & Applied Economics at the Universityof Wisconsin–Madison. Liu’s research interests include energy and environmentaleconomics, empirical industrial organization, and applied econometrics. Chenyu Yangis an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at theUniversity of Maryland. His interests are in empirical industrial organization,particularly within innovation, product variety and market design. About the Project The Resources for the Future (RFF) Obstacles to Energy Infrastructure researchproject aims to identify and analyze critical barriers to building energy infrastructurein the US and improve their representation in models. The project began in 2023 witha series of expert workshops convened to discuss the most significant obstacles toinfrastructure and policies meant to address them. These meetings informed thedevelopment of a research agenda to further our capabilities to understand and modelobstacles to energy infrastructure. The project identified emerging opportunitiesfor research and commissioned several studies, including the one presented here, toadvance our analytical understanding of these obstacles Acknowledgements We thank David Brown, Joshua Macey, Karen Palmer, Kevin Rennert, and MollyRobertson for helpful comments and discussions. All errors are our own. This workswas funded under Resources for the Future’s ‘Obstacles to Energy Infrastructureproject’, as well as the National Science Foundation (SES-2215063) and the Universityof Maryland Grand Challenges Grant Program. About RFF Resources for the Future (RFF) is an independent, nonprofit research institution inWashington, DC. Its mission is to improve environmental, energy, and natural resourcedecisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. RFF iscommitted to being the most widely trusted source of research insights and policysolutions leading to a healthy environment and a thriving economy. Working papers are research materials circulated by their authors for purposes ofinformation and discussion. They have not necessarily undergone formal peer review.The views expressed here are those of the individual authors and may differ from thoseof other RFF experts, its officers, or its directors. Sharing Our Work Our work is available for sharing and adaptation under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. Youcan copy and redistribute our material in any medium or format; you must giveappropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made,and you may not apply additional restrictions. You may do so in any reasonablemanner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.You may not use the material for commercial purposes. If you remix, transform, orbuild upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material. For moreinformation, visithttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Grid Connection Costs as a Barrier to Building NewGeneration: Evidence and Implications forTransmission Policy Sarah Johnston1∗†, Yifei Liu2†, Chenyu Yang3† 1Department of Economics, University of Calgary, Calgary & T2N 1N4, Canada 3Department of Economics, University of Maryland, College Park & 20742, U.S.A. ∗Corresponding author. Email: sarah.johnston2@ucalgary.ca †These authors contributed equally to this work. Meeting projected growth in electricity demand and climate goals will requirebuilding new electricity generators. The grid connection process is seen as a keyconstraint on this development. We collect new data on grid connection costs forPJM, the largest regional grid operator in the United States. We geographicallymatch these costs to transmission spending to study their determinants. Usingregression analysis, we find that these costs, and especially the network upgradeportion, are difficult to predict: generators with similar characteristics can havevery different costs. We also find that planned generators with high networkupgrade costs are much more likely to be canceled. Finally, prior transmissionspending by the grid operator is associated with lower network upgrade costs forconnecting generators. These findings emphasize the critical role of transmissioncapacity in expanding electricity generation capacity. After two decades of less than 1 percent annual growth in electricity demand, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission predicts growth of 3 percent per year for 2025–2029 (1). Thisdramatic increase is driven by data centers, manufacturing, buildings, and vehicles. Solar and windaccounted for most new generation capacity in recent years (2–