Energy transition crosscurrents: the pivot to reliability confronts growing costs

While interest in development of dispatchable generation has grown over the last year, escalation in new power plant costs has disrupted long-term planning. This comes at a time when grid managers have taken an increasingly conservative assessment of how much resources contribute to system reliability, resulting in new auction rules and higher prices for Resource Adequacy. Expectations for rapid load growth across all US markets only compound the cost problem. Datacenter developers, themselves a large part of the load growth equation, have increasingly diversified their electricity procurement efforts as a result.