PJM developer Geenex anticipates being in the market to raise additional capital as it looks to advance its considerable pipeline in Transition Cycle 2 (TC2), said Emily Williams, CEO of the Charlotte, North Carolina-based developer in an interview with NPM.

Geenex’s model, over the course of its 12-years in the business, is to sell projects at pre-NTP. The developer has queue positions in North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois, but is also building greenfield projects in other states. The company typically does siting, interconnection, permitting and community engagement across its portfolio of grid-scale solar and storage projects.

The company has 50 active positions in PJM, including projects Geenex owns and projects it has sold to partners. The queue positions also allow Geenex to change the project type as it converted a few sites from solar to 500 MW of storage given the increased demand for those projects as of late.

“We look to sell our projects before major interconnection milestones, but at a time when we have good view on interconnection results,” said Williams.

This was the case after receiving positive impact studies on paired projects in Indiana comprised of a collective 700 MW solar and 150 MW storage. Geenex received the positive studies on the 450 MW solar portion of the project in Transition Cycle 1, but there are three other portions of the project in TC2: 250 MW of solar and 150 MW of storage across two BESS positions. Geenex is under exclusivity with one buyer for the entire project.

But in TC2, which is expected to advance in 2026, Geenex has 3 GW of solar and 1.5 GW of storage. Williams anticipates that the application process itself for those projects might yield an additional capital raise.

Geenex advanced this portfolio by placing the GW into the TC2 application phase by the December 17, 2024 deadline. The RD2 deposits are due in order to enter phase 2 of the studies. Geenex will be required to make the RD2 deposits, expected in 3Q25, after receiving an impact study from Phase 1. GIAs on TC2 projects are expected in 4Q26.

New Energy Capital, a subsidiary of Victory Capital, provided financial support to Geenex in 2019 and this continued with additional financing support in 2021.

Williams stressed that Geenex is not in the market now but is exploring avenues particularly as it continues to advance projects in its TC2 pipeline.

More recently, Geenex received some positive news when the Ohio Power Siting Board (OPSB) cleared its 140 MW Mink Solar project in Ohio. While Ohio has seen its fair share of opposition at the local level, Williams said the company conducted robust community engagement efforts and approached the community with Ohio’s SB 52 standards, despite the project being grandfathered in has been garnering many letters of support from those within the counties of Defiance and Paulding, which will host the project. Mink Solar anticipates an interconnection agreement in 3Q25.

The situation is less straightforward in Indiana where there is no state-level oversight board and projects have trouble advancing due to local ordinances restricting permitting. Williams, an Indianapolis resident, and formerly an employee at Indiana Municipal Power Agency, predicts changes on the horizon, particularly given some of the signals from some of the state’s utilities as of late.

AES Indiana announced this past October it would be launching four separate RFPs for 9 GW of capacity. Duke Energy Indiana also outlined its preferred portfolio in October which looked at the impacts on retiring its eight operating coal plants in the next two decades and its impacts on resultant replacement capacity

“The state has always been a business oriented,” said Williams, adding that “if they are seeing permitting being an obstacle towards getting generation of any type to the grid and as a result, opportunities are lost for the state, then policy changes would be a byproduct of this.”

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