Paces

A federal court just gave wind and solar developers a lifeline, 27 days before the July 4 OBBBA deadline. It struck down IRS Notice 2025-42 and restored the 5% safe harbor. That's one of four stories that Stuart Pomeroy breaks down in this week's Power Weekly. Also on the list: - May inflation is at 4.2%, driven partly by energy prices. Building power infrastructure quickly and cleanly is now an economic priority, not just a climate one. - Blue Owl put ~$975M into recapitalizing a Northern Virginia data center, a vote of confidence that Mid-Atlantic Tier 1 still commands the capital even as Tier 2 and 3 markets heat up. - Primergy closed a $760M refinancing on Gemini, the largest co-located solar-plus-storage project in the country, and more proof that capital markets are rewarding storage-first design. Watch below, and let us know what stories are on your radar!

A few weeks ago I went to the NY-BEST Capture the Energy conference in Albany with a riddle: if the grid is desperately short on capacity, why can't battery storage developers get projects financed? As James McWalter put it over lunch one day recently, selling power in this environment should be as easy as "selling water to people dying of thirst." Yet the talk of the conference was all about the need for specialized state programs to fill in market gaps. Something fundamental about the law of supply and demand on the grid is broken. The answer comes down to market design. Wholesale energy markets cap scarcity prices. Capacity markets (also with caps) clear on time horizons too short to underwrite a 15-year project. And so states have to manufacture the revenue certainty that neither market can provide. The people dying of thirst aren't buying water because we've made it illegal to charge what it's worth. Yet when market design suppresses volatility, it doesn't disappear, it just leaks out in different places... After talking it over with Elias Hatem, we think the way out is bilateral contracting at prices that reflect actual scarcity, realized via an emerging class of tolling agreements with the customers whose load growth created the crunch in the first place. More on the details of what this looks like coming soon. Here's the full link: https://lnkd.in/eZyzicBV Thank you to Lynne Kiesling and Jacob Mays for the theoretical/academic inspiration.

An AI screening of thousands of sites only saves you time if you can trust the results. That's the real tension in development right now. AI can compress timelines, but an output that looks confident and turns out wrong, like a siting screen that quietly misses a permitting flag, costs more time than moving slowly ever would. The teams pulling ahead have figured out where AI belongs, where human judgment still has to win, and how to validate an output before it shapes a real decision. Join us on June 30 at 3 PM ET, when Kyle Baranko (Head of Product) and Tony Wagler (Director of Development) are running a free session on exactly that. They'll cover where AI meaningfully supports development work, where it doesn't yet, and how to check its outputs before they move a project. It includes a live demo of Paces Agent working through a real development scenario, with expert review on the high-stakes calls. You'll leave with a practical framework for where AI fits, how to validate what it tells you, and how to use it without adding hidden risk. Register now: https://hubs.la/Q04kL-J10

20 data center projects were canceled in Q1 2026. 71% of Americans now oppose data center construction in their area. Support for renewables has split along ideological lines. Developers aren't just asking "who are the key players here" anymore. They're asking, "How do I actually get to yes?" That's what our new Engagement Strategy Modular Report add-ons are built to answer. A per-jurisdiction plan layered onto our Local Key Stakeholder Mapping and Community Sentiment modules: who to approach first, in what order, what you can credibly offer, and what to say when you hit opposition. Get a report to understand the landscape and navigate it.

1,400 gigawatts of clean energy is waiting to connect to the US grid. That's 10,300 projects. What gets buried in that number: fewer than 20% of projects with a queue position actually succeed. The real bottleneck is committing capital to the wrong site before you know it can interconnect. Developers who enter the queue with viable sites move through it faster and with better odds. That's the case for pre-development. Model risk before you send out an LOI, and you avoid joining the 80% that never get throug: https://hubs.la/Q04kwzrR0

Developers are following the power and the politics, battery storage is having a moment, and states aren't waiting for Washington to set the rules on large loads. In this week's Power Weekly, Stuart Pomeroy covers: → Oracle and OpenAI broke ground on a $16B data center in Michigan, a state that wasn't on anyone's tier-one list two years ago. Developers are going where the power AND the politics are cooperative. → American Clean Power Association (ACP) Q1 report: a record http://2.4 GW of storage installed, up 48% year over year, with a 53.8 GW pipeline. The storage market is growing up fast. → California's SB 886 and 887 passed the Senate. Pennsylvania tied state tax incentives to clean energy requirements. States are writing their own large-load rules, and the count is now 23.

A utility indicated 400 MW of available capacity to a powered land investor. A Paces Power Flow Study confirmed only 150 MW. That finding stopped them from committing $750,000 to the next phase of the interconnection study. The study also flagged a baseline grid requirement the utility had never raised: above a certain MW threshold, the transmission system requires a redundant line. That had never come up in months of utility conversations about a 400 MW load. The project is paused. But the firm's take: "I could have spent a much more reasonable amount of money to figure that out versus spending close to $750,000 and others to find out the same information 12 months from now." Utility numbers are a starting point. Independent analysis is how you validate them. Read the full case study → https://lnkd.in/ekjtPpJr

One of our AI engineers Matthew Cho ran an Unconference session last week on something most software teams don't think to teach: the science of storytelling. Inspired by Will Storr's Science of Storytelling book, the session covered why humans evolved to communicate through narrative, the pedagogical spectrum, how to construct a story that actually lands, and what LLM models reveal about how characters and plot are computationally simulated. The Paces team walked away with a different lens for how we share information, and a sharper sense of when a story does the work better than a doc, a dashboard, or a meeting. 📖

Data center load growth is reshaping interconnection queues for distributed developers, even the ones nowhere near a hyperscaler. On the latest Build, Repeat. podcast episode, Navya Gundeti, Director of Project Development at ENGIE North America, broke it down: utilities are reshuffling clusters, rethinking methodology, and introducing new technical thresholds for distributed-scale interconnection that didn't exist before. Distributed solar is absorbing the spillover from the load surge. Listen to the latest episode here: https://hubs.la/Q04h_PJ60