State of interconnection queues — January 2024

Jan 17, 2024

Note: if the terms “interconnection queue”, “ISO”, or “RTO” are confusing to you, read our 1-min primer/FAQ here first

We used Interconnection.fyi‘s daily-updated dataset to analyze the state of the interconnection queues this month.

To be precise, we took a snapshot of the queue from Interconnection.fyi’s dataset at Jan 1, 2024 to produce these charts. Interconnection.fyi processes daily updates of the queue - for access to this historical data, or if you want any reports constructed of the data, contact us here.

Here are some trends we’ve found:

What’s in the queue right now?

1.3 terawatts of capacity in the queue

Interconnection.fyi aggregates queue data across all 6 major RTOs/ISOs and 20 utilities in the U.S.

Based on this data there are currently at least 1.3 terawatts of capacity in the queue. 1.3 terawatts of capacity being planned. And that is not counting the long tail of utilities and other distributed energy assets Interconnection.fyi is not gathering presently in the US.

How much is 1.3 terawatts? Well there’s 300 GW (0.3 terawatt) in operation currently that have gone thru the queues listed above. 1.3 terawatts is 1,300 gigawatts, and 1 GW could power around 850,000 households at a given time.

Analysis of capacity in queues

Let’s look more into the in-queued capacity data

Total capacity by generation type

Standalone solar is the dominant generation type in the queue currently, followed by wind and battery storage. There’s a long-tail of hybrid generation (i.e. solar AND battery storage, or solar AND wind) as well.

Breaking it down further into each power market:

Total capacity in the queue is higher than existing capacity in many power markets

Note: existing capacity for southeast & west non-ISO is not shown since not all non-ISO utilities publish their in-service/operational queue projects

Planned capacity entering the queue in 2023 declined slightly after several years of high growth

Excluding CAISO and MISO, we still have an upward trend

And here’s the same chart broken down by power market , showing how MISO and CAISO have effectively stopped taking new requests in their queues in 2023 and 2022 respectively. Scroll to the bottom of this article to interact with an interactive version of this chart.

Proposed completion time analysis

If we take the proposed completion date and subtract it by the enqueued date, we get a proposed completion time

CAISO and PJM have the longest median proposed completion times over all time (CAISO’s spread arguably worse)

Median completion time decreased for projects entering the queue in 2022/2023

The majority of proposed completion times for active requests will happen before 2030

Conclusion

By the way, if you’d like to interact with the data via interactive graphics, checkout the embed below (or here) and the charts in our front page https://interconnection.fyi/

👉 If you’d like to purchase the underlying data from this report or want to run a report on a current or historical dataset, see our various self-data products here or email us here

Addendum

Jesse Jenkins (the renowned energy researcher based at Princeton) asked for a chart plotting projects entering and leaving the queue in the same chart. Here it is!