The power plants waiting for a way onto the grid

Berkeley Lab’s 2026 Queued Up report counted more than 2,060 gigawatts of proposed generation and storage seeking grid connection at the end of 2025. Active queue volume had fallen by 10 percent from the previous year. That decline was not simply a measure of projects moving into service: withdrawals and fewer new requests also contributed.[1]

The report found that projects completed in 2025 had spent a median of more than five years between interconnection request and commercial operation in the regions with available data. It also identified 549 gigawatts with draft or executed interconnection agreements that had not yet reached operation.[1]

Those two numbers describe different kinds of incompleteness. A project without an agreement still faces uncertainty about its connection. One with an agreement may have cleared that question while remaining far from producing electricity. Adding them together measures the volume of proposals, not a dependable schedule of new supply.

Berkeley Lab also cautions against reading the shrinking queue as proof that reform has worked. It says the full effect of interconnection changes is still too early to assess. Its dataset spans operators representing roughly 98 percent of existing U.S. generating capacity, making it broad evidence of the pipeline—but not a construction forecast.[1]

A queue is also a coordination problem

FERC’s Order 2023 addresses part of the problem by moving toward studies of groups of projects. Instead of treating every request as a separate sequential exercise, transmission providers study clusters and allocate associated costs. Greater financial-readiness and site-control requirements aim to reduce speculative requests. The design tries to improve the quality of the queue as well as the speed of processing it.[2]

The commission’s explanation makes clear why withdrawals are consequential: when a major project leaves, the remaining cluster may need another study. Projects are connected through shared assumptions about the network and upgrades. The application sitting ahead of another developer is therefore more than a place in line; it can affect the engineering and economics of the projects around it.[2]

A smaller queue could be healthy if weak proposals leave early, before consuming extensive study effort. It could also be troubling if viable projects exit after being assigned costs they cannot finance. The same downward arrow can describe either outcome. A useful assessment would distinguish when withdrawals occur, what prompted them, and what happens to the projects that remain.

The missing bridge to actual electricity

The Energy Department’s April 2024 transmission roadmap groups the challenge around better data, faster and more effective processes, economic efficiency, and reliability. It treats improved transparency and study methods as parts of a broader effort, rather than assuming that processing applications faster automatically creates enough transmission capacity. It also identifies the role of software and computing in handling growing study workloads.[3]

That suggests a better public scorecard than queue size alone. Track the interval to a credible study result, the uncertainty in upgrade costs, the share reaching construction, and the eventual arrival of operating capacity. Follow comparable groups of applications over time. Otherwise, clearing out old requests can look like a productivity breakthrough even when the next cohort faces much the same difficulty.

The supply question also depends on what a completed project can deliver. A nameplate gigawatt is not a promise of a gigawatt in every hour, and storage capacity expressed in power does not specify how long it can sustain that output. Combining generation and storage into one headline total is useful for describing applications. It is less useful for matching supply to a particular evening, season or industrial load.

For readers watching electricity-intensive industries, including AI infrastructure, the practical distinction is between an announced project, an executable connection, and an operating resource. Each is evidence of progress at a different stage. The queue report shows how much ambition exists upstream. The harder reporting task is to follow that ambition through the constraints that determine when electricity will actually become available.