Queue Analysis: America's Interconnection Crisis

Key insight: Solar and storage together make up ~81% of the queue, driven by the Inflation Reduction Act. Gas capacity surged 72% year-over-year to 136 GW, reflecting new data center and AI demand — and that was before Texas's 80.6 GW gas development pipeline for DCs and the SoftBank/AEP 9.2 GW Ohio announcement in March 2026. Meanwhile, solar dropped 12%, wind dropped 26%, and storage fell 13%, reflecting historic withdrawal rates and a 12% overall decrease in active queue volume per LBNL.

The West dominates. Non-ISO Western regions hold 706 GW, the largest queue in the country. CAISO follows at 523 GW. PJM's queue is smaller but among the most congested, with some of the lowest completion rates. ERCOT processes requests fastest but has less stringent study requirements.

A decade of deterioration. The median project built in 2018–2024 waited over 4 years from interconnection request to commercial operations, up from 3 years in 2015 and less than 2 years in 2008 (LBNL). Wind projects wait the longest (~5.5 years) due to siting and transmission constraints. Solar has shortened slightly thanks to distributed siting, but storage waits are climbing fast.

87% of capacity never gets built. Gas projects have the best completion rate at 31%, followed by wind (20%), solar (13%), and batteries (11%). Most projects withdraw during the study phase when they discover upgrade costs they can't afford, often hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to a single project.

The hidden tax on the energy transition. When a 500 MW solar project waits 5 years instead of 2, that's ~2.4 TWh of clean energy never generated. Multiply across thousands of projects and the climate cost is staggering. Meanwhile, developers burn through millions in holding costs, studies, and legal fees, costs ultimately borne by consumers.