Zero Injection

There’s a FERC filing today with a phrase that sounds like it belongs in a syringe, not a spreadsheet: “zero injection.” MISO wants a fast lane, a 90-day review instead of years, for generation that’s colocated with a large load and never actually pushes power back onto the transmission system. Google and Xcel like it. Sierra Club and NRDC don’t, worried it locks in cost-shifting without fixing much of anything.

Same week, a Kevala study says front-of-meter solar and storage sitting on distribution substations could cover 32% of California’s summer peak load by 2032, no transmission upgrades required. Different lobby, different goal, same structural move: stop trying to get through the queue, and build around it instead.

I wrote a few days ago about the number that explains why everyone’s doing this: only 13% of what applied to connect between 2000 and 2020 has actually made it onto the grid, median wait past five years now. That’s not a rule anyone’s breaking so much as one everyone’s quietly routing around, because the rule stopped working around the time the queue did. Data centers are colocating their own generation so they never have to ask transmission’s permission. Community solar advocates are proposing the same substations serve load locally instead of waiting on an upgrade that might not arrive this decade. Neither side particularly wants to fix the queue. They’d rather not need it.

Meanwhile in Texas, ERCOT just posted its sixth straight week of record peak demand, the kind of streak that used to be a headline and now reads like weather. The workarounds are multiplying faster than the thing they’re built around is getting fixed.