Rev Renewables Puts a 250 MW CAISO Queue Entry Near $750,000 as Cluster 16 Opens October 1
- Capacity & Wholesale Markets News Policy & Markets
Marin Holt
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- 6 minutes read
- Queue entry cost, 250 MW: $750,000
- Cluster 16 window: October 1 to October 15, 2026
- Example interconnection cost: $20 million
- Network upgrade half refunded: $10 million
- MISO entry costs: $1.5 million
A 250 MW, four-hour battery project pays roughly $750,000 just to enter the California Independent System Operator’s Cluster 16 interconnection queue. Sandeep Arora gave that figure at the 2026 US Solar and Storage Finance event in Garden Grove, California. He heads transmission and markets at LS Power-owned Rev Renewables. CAISO opens the Cluster 16 window on October 1, 2026 and closes it on October 15, 2026.
What California pays back
Arora described a 250 MW project carrying $20 million in total interconnection cost, split evenly between network upgrades and interconnection customer facilities. California reimburses the network upgrade half. “In California, once you build the project, you get your money back,” he said. He told the audience that PJM does not refund that cost, and that MISO mostly does not either.
By his account a similar project in MISO faces entry costs upward of $1.5 million, with a further million at risk through phase one studies. ERCOT socializes almost all of the cost, Arora said, but it sells no capacity. That trade runs in both directions for a merchant battery.
The refund has a ceiling
The reimbursement is not open-ended, and the conference framing left that out. CAISO publishes a dollar-per-megawatt maximum on Reliability Network Upgrade reimbursement. Section 14.3.2 of its Generator Interconnection Deliverability Allocation Procedures requires the ISO to reset that maximum every year. The published limits apply to interconnection requests that reach commercial operation within the applicable period. A developer modeling a full refund on a $10 million upgrade is modeling the best case, not the rule.
CAISO has also narrowed what it agrees to study. “Gone are the days when CAISO would take every single project,” Arora said of the operator’s older queue practice. The ISO now studies up to 150% of the headroom it calculates at each location.
Why It Matters
Interconnection cost, not battery price, increasingly decides where storage gets built. A developer weighing CAISO against PJM or MISO should model the refund together with its per-megawatt ceiling, rather than the headline upgrade estimate. The $750,000 entry cost screens out thin balance sheets before a single study starts. Treat these figures as one developer’s experience at one event. CAISO’s posted reimbursement limit is the document that governs, and the ISO moves it every year.
Critical Perspective
Every cost figure here comes from one executive at one conference, and Rev Renewables develops in the markets he is ranking. The posted Reliability Network Upgrade rule is the harder number, and it caps reimbursement at a dollar-per-megawatt maximum that the operator resets each year. A developer who books the full $10 million refund against a $20 million interconnection bill has assumed that ceiling sits above its own project. Which side of that limit does a 250 MW battery actually land on?
