Just as NextEra announced the largest hybrid renewable project in the USA, for the Western Farmers Electric Cooperative (WFEC), Ameren Missouri pulled the plug on its deal with EDF Renewables to build a 157 MW wind power project, citing unacceptably high transmission upgrade costs. The two cases paint very different pictures, and illustrate the highs and lows of the smart grid and renewable energy business. Embracing distributed energy resources (DERs) like solar and wind, as well as the battery storage arrays that enable them to be used in optimum fashion, requires upgrades to electricity distribution infrastructure. A very rough comparison is that it is like converting a one-way boulevard into a two-way street, so that you can transition from the…