Something has shifted in the clean energy packages we help scope. Five years ago the hard questions were technical: could the heat pump reach the temperature, could the battery survive the duty cycle, could the process be electrified at all. Those questions have largely been answered, and answered encouragingly.
The binding constraint now is frequently a grid connection. Not the physics of it, which is understood, but the queue, the reinforcement cost and the lead time — none of which respond to better engineering.
This has a consequence that engineers find unwelcome and finance directors find obvious: a scheme designed to fit within an existing connection is often worth more than a technically superior scheme that requires a new one. Managed charging that avoids a substation upgrade, a phased conversion that stays within existing capacity, a process change that shifts demand rather than increasing it. These are unglamorous and they get built.
The practical advice is to establish the connection position first, before the technology is selected. It takes a fortnight and a competent power systems engineer, and it determines the design space for everything that follows. Projects that do this discover their constraints while they can still design around them. Projects that leave it until the application stage discover them at the point of maximum sunk cost.
One of the packages on our board is a worked example, retained after completion. The naive assessment implied a reinforcement that would have ended the project. A scheduling study, costing rather less than a month of consultancy, established that two phases of conversion fitted within the existing connection and identified precisely where the limit was. The project proceeded. The engineering that saved it was arithmetic about dwell times.