Renewable Energy Phasing

Transcript

Lilly McKenna
Partner, Energy Development Group

I'm Lilly McKenna. I'm a partner in our San Francisco office and I am a state regulatory attorney.

I think one of the challenges for clients is just to set expectations on how long the process can take when we are handling matters before the Public Utilities Commission, and what the regulatory lag can mean. We’re starting to see a refocus of that and an attempt to streamline, for example, permitting and interconnection, to get things moving forward faster. It's been a huge issue in bringing projects online, just energizing projects. For example, we have these mandates in California to electrify fleets, and that's a huge infrastructure undertaking. And a lot of times, the companies will go out, make plans to comply with those regulations, and then find that they can't get their projects online because there's insufficient hosting capacity or a huge delay with PG&E. One key factor to bear in mind is the timing and thinking about how to engage key stakeholders early in the process, and how to phase key milestones in your project development so that you don't end up with a considerable lag where you're sitting on a site that you've invested money in but can't put to use yet because of that regulatory lag.