TrendWatch: 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.

Why are timing and phasing critical in energy projects?

I think one of the challenges for clients is just to set expectations too on how long the process can take when we are handling matters before the Public Utilities Commission and what the regulatory lag can mean. And so we're starting to see a refocus of that in an attempt to kind of streamline, for example, permitting for projects 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 a huge delay with PG&E. And so one key factor to bear in mind is the timing and thinking about how you're going to phase your project development so that you don't end up with a huge lag where you're just sitting on a site that you've invested money in but can't put to use yet because of that regulatory lag.