By
Jannik Wind Gotthardsen
Business Unit Director
5 minute read
Getting a renewable energy project connected to the grid takes patience and due diligence. In the US, projects reaching commercial operation in 2025 waited a median of five years from their first interconnection request. Three in four projects that entered the queue between 2000 and 2020 never got that far. They were withdrawn.
It is not only a US problem. Grids everywhere are getting harder to connect to, and harder to stay compliant with, as more wind, solar and storage comes online.
And even if you manage to meet the technical criteria, timing is of utmost importance. You need to be compliant in due time. A compliance clock starts the moment an interconnection agreement is signed, and its deadlines can put the entire asset at risk. For an asset that earns from day one of operation, every month of delay is revenue gone for good and the original business case behind it changes.
This is where the right expertise can change the outcome. Most compliance work still leans on type certificates for the inverter and the power plant controller that interfaces with the grid. A type test proves a component works in a lab. It says nothing about how that component behaves on a specific grid at the point of connection.
Therefore, past a certain size, grid operators want more than a type certificate. They want an electrical model of the whole plant, built and simulated the way they assess it themselves. Done well, this is closer to a digital twin of the plant than a paperwork exercise, and it only works if it matches what actually gets built.
At Creadis, we pair deep electrical engineering expertise with industry-specific software development capability to run grid compliance as a fixed, predictable process, including the development of electrical models. By doing so, we ensure that the documentation and evidence needed to meet the deadlines of the compliance clock are taken care of in due time.
Because an electrical model is only as good as the component models behind it, accurate, up-to-date models from the turbine, PCS (inverters) and power plant controller supplier, matching what will actually be delivered on site, are the single biggest factor in how fast and how predictably a compliance process runs. Getting these electrical models build, accurately and in formats that the operators tolerate is the new standard of securing grid connection compliance. Locking that down early, before procurement and commissioning plans are finalised, can be the difference between meeting the projected COD (Commercial Operation Day) and generate revenue from the date the business case assumes.
It might look like a complicated process, but there are few pathways to optimizing and automating it to stay on track for CoD.
Despite grid compliance not getting any simpler, the right combination of technical progress, hard software skills and a deep understanding of inverter-based generation and consumptioncan come together to solve most of it. If you find the right partner.
CREADIS has built and certified electrical models across dozens of markets, and that track record is what turns a compliance timeline from a guess into a fixed date on the calendar. Meeting the deadlines protects a project’s business case and missing them is one of the largest risks in getting the asset’s real-life performance to match the models behind the investments.
Background data: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “Queued Up: 2026 Edition” (US interconnection queue data); ENTSO-E, Phase II Technical Report on Grid Forming Requirements, November 2025.
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Why grid codes keep tightening
More inverter-based generation on a grid means more automation, and grid operators raise requirements to stay in control of it. ENTSO-E, Europe’s transmission operator association, is folding a mandatory grid-forming capability into its next Requirements for Generators code, covering all new storage and renewable plants above 1 MW. Electrical models for a plant are typically built in tools such as PowerFactory, PSCAD or PSS/E, the same software grid operators use to check compliance.
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