Interconnection

Interconnection covers both the engineering — the line, the substation bay, the protection equipment — and the regulatory process, which involves studies, cost allocation and a queue position. For a large load it is routinely the longest item on the project schedule.

Cost is driven mostly by distance to a substation of adequate voltage class and by whether network upgrades are triggered. Two sites twenty miles apart can differ by tens of millions of dollars and several years on interconnection alone. Whether a particular substation can actually serve a particular load is a question the utility's system study answers, not one any public dataset does; proximity and voltage class tell you which candidates are worth studying.