Consumers are increasingly demanding that their electricity come from renewable energy. And zero-carbon utility-scale wind and solar energy have become the lowest cost forms of power generation. As a result, utilities and corporate and industrial users of electricity are buying renewable energy at an unprecedented rate. Yet it is difficult to develop large-scale renewable energy projects near population centers due to lack of available land.
Some of the best wind resources in the world are found in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States. However, new wind and solar generation in the Midwestern region known as MISO is bottlenecked by transmission system constraints. Without the addition of transmission capacity from projects like the SOO Green HVDC Link, these otherwise abundant sources of low-cost renewable energy will remain stranded, unable to reach customers.
The SOO Green HVDC Link will deliver high-quality wind and solar generation from the Upper Midwest, where large scale renewable generation can be built and operated most efficiently, to buyers in PJM, the nation’s largest electricity market.
The addition of SOO Green could enable more than 4,000 megawatts of new wind and solar generation in the Upper Midwest to supply electricity to customers in the PJM region, where demand for renewable energy is growing rapidly.
In MISO, SOO Green will withdraw clean energy from a diverse portfolio of wind and solar energy projects expected to be built across a broad geographic region in the Upper Midwest. These additional clean energy resources will further reduce the carbon intensity of the power grid and improve MISO’s system reliability.
SOO Green will transmit and deliver the renewable generation to a robust point of interconnection in the PJM market just west of Chicago, providing customers with direct access to a highly reliable and robust source of clean energy.
