Many Americans can’t access power grid for Biden’s solar subsidies.

Why Biden’s Green Energy Revolution is Facing a Power Grid Problem

When President Joe Biden offered tax credits to anyone buying solar panels, Colorado homeowner Stacie took out loans to install $30,000 worth of panels on her roof. However, nearly six months later, those panels sat unused, generating no power. The problem seemed to have a simple fix: Stacie’s energy provider merely needed to hook the panels up to its power grid—but there’s no room.

Increased demand driven by Biden’s green subsidies, combined with inadequate power grid capacity, has left thousands of green energy projects like Stacie’s without power, rendering them useless. This predicament reflects a significant snag in Biden’s green energy revolution. While the hundreds of billions of dollars in green energy spending allocated through the Inflation Reduction Act led to a flood of new wind and solar projects, America’s antiquated power grid is not ready to accommodate them.

The Capacity Problem

Nearly 1,300 gigawatts worth of green energy projects are waiting to be connected to power, according to a recent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report. The country’s entire electric grid has an installed power capacity of just 1,250 gigawatts. This capacity problem has led to massive power connection backlogs, frustrating developers and everyday consumers alike. At the end of 2022, more than 10,000 energy projects—most of them solar—were waiting for permission to connect to grids, the Berkeley report shows.

• Developers now wait four years on average to receive connection approval, prompting many to give up and withdraw from the queue.
• In one case, energy provider Xcel told a Minnesota customer it would take 15 years to connect a rooftop solar system to the company’s grid.

Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law does include money for grid upgrades, but preparing the nation’s power grid for Biden’s green energy transition will likely take much more money than that. California alone must spend a whopping $9.3 billion on power grid upgrades to support its transition to green energy, the nonprofit that operates the state’s electric grid revealed in April.

The Solar Industry Supply Chain Problem

Inadequate power grid capacity is far from the only issue plaguing Biden’s solar energy push. China dominates the solar industry supply chain, controlling more than 80 percent of the world’s solar panel production. As a result, U.S. solar companies have turned to Chinese goods to satisfy the increased demand associated with Biden’s green energy spending, a move that could cost them as bipartisan support grows in Congress for retroactive tariffs on Chinese solar panels.

• U.S. developers say those tariffs would cost them at least $1 billion in fees, prompting the solar industry to stress its need to import Chinese goods.
• Biden has so far sided with his allies in the solar industry. The Democrat last summer suspended for two years tariffs on Chinese solar panels sold out of Southeast Asia, arguing that the tariffs would hurt “short-term solar panel supply.”

However, a bipartisan group of senators voted to reinstate those tariffs, a vote that Florida Republican Rick Scott said “affirmed that the United States will never tolerate a hostile takeover of our industries.” Biden promised to veto the measure in an April statement, which said the Chinese tariffs would hurt the “demand for reliable and clean energy” and “create deep uncertainty for jobs and investments in the solar supply chain and the solar installation market.”

Overall, Biden’s green energy revolution is facing significant challenges, and it remains to be seen how the administration will address them.