Your Interconnection Timeline Starts at Civil Design

Interconnection delays have become one of the biggest headaches in the energy development world right now. The queues are backed up, timelines are slipping, and developers are frustrated.

One thing, however, that doesn't get talked about enough is how much of that pain can actually be reduced before it ever starts, way back at the civil design phase. This is something we’ve been watching play out on projects across Colorado for a few years now.

Where you site your project, how you orient access roads, where your collector lines run, how you handle grading relative to existing transmission infrastructure - these all have downstream consequences. For example: utility companies and grid operators evaluate interconnection applications based partly on how a project is designed and where it sits relative to existing infrastructure. If your site layout requires significant transmission infrastructure to connect, or if your access and collector routing creates conflicts, it adds cost and time to the study process and can bump you back in the queue.

Interconnection studies are complicated by nature, and issues that surface during the review phase can be costly to resolve. We've seen this firsthand on projects in our area. Small decisions made in the first few weeks of a project can end up either saving or costing developers serious time and money later.

We think about interconnection from day one. It's not something we hand off to the electrical team and move on from. Our civil work, from site selection and feasibility through grading design, gets done with that downstream interconnection process in mind. This means fewer surprises later.

If you're a developer sitting in the interconnection queue right now wondering what went sideways, or if you've just got a new project coming up and want to get ahead of it, the civil side of this matters more than many people realize and it's worth a conversation early.