Insight · October 18, 2026
The middle mile: 5.4 GW already on the distribution grid
A 2026 white paper's figures on unused distribution capacity, and what they mean for utilities and large loads.
California has spent a decade arguing about the first mile and the last mile. The first mile is large, remote generation that then waits on transmission. The last mile is rooftop solar on a single building. The capacity that is already built, and often lightly used, sits in between.
A 2026 white paper, Why End-to-End Sustainable Energy Solutions Create Value for California Communities (Pathfinder Communications), puts a number on that middle mile. These figures are the white paper’s analysis.
What the white paper found
- The existing distribution grid can support 5.4 GW of community-scale solar and storage.
- Using it could mean $6.5 billion in ratepayer savings over 20 years.
- $4.6 billion of that is a reduction in resource adequacy costs.
- $2 billion is savings from transmission upgrades that would not have to be built.
- Community-scale projects in the analysis reach operation in 2 to 3 years. Utility-scale projects in the same comparison take 5 to 10 years.
The paper’s point is not that transmission is unnecessary. It is that a share of new supply can interconnect where the wires already are, and that this is faster than waiting on a new line.
A separate industry view, from a post discussing the same gap, expects more than 8 GW of community-choice solar and storage nationally by 2035, with California able to represent more than 5 GW of that. Community choice aggregators already serve more than a third of California’s electricity customers, which is why the white paper treats them as a practical buyer for distribution-sited projects.
What this means for a large load
A customer who needs power in three years cannot use a transmission project that takes eight. The useful question is whether the feeder in front of the site already has room, and whether on-site solar, storage, and a limited export profile would make the request fit.
That is the same move as asking the grid for 20 instead of 100. The white paper says a large fraction of the 20 may already be sitting on the distribution system, unused.
What we do with it
Your Utility does not publish the white paper and does not build the projects. We use this kind of hosting-capacity thinking in Power-Ready assessments and in large-load studies: where the feeder can take the project, what has to change in the design so that it can, and what the customer should not promise the utility until that is known.