The interconnection queue is the new bottleneck for American power

Solar and storage developers now wait longer to connect to the grid than they spend building the project itself. That gap, not equipment cost or demand, is what is actually setting the pace of American clean-energy development.

Across nearly every regional grid operator in the country, the line to plug in has grown longer than the time it takes to build the project itself. That single fact, more than turbine costs, panel prices, or public appetite, is what is actually setting the pace of American clean-energy development right now.

Where the backlog actually lives

At year-end 2025, roughly 2.06 terawatts of generation and storage capacity were sitting in U.S. interconnection queues, spread across nearly 8,200 active projects, according to Berkeley Lab's annual queue data. The median time from interconnection request to commercial operation for projects built in 2025 was more than five years. And of the capacity that entered queues between 2000 and 2020, roughly three-quarters had been withdrawn by the end of 2025 — proposed, studied, and abandoned before ever reaching a grid.

There are signs of movement. LBNL's latest queue report points to early signs of improvement in processing times. PJM stakeholders have endorsed a new backstop procurement proposal and voted to reject the region's old "connect and manage" approach, a structural change aimed at clearing speculative projects out of the line before they can clog a study cycle. And in the same window, FERC denied a waiver request for a $2 billion gas-fired plant seeking PJM's fast-track review — evidence that even an accelerated queue track is not a rubber stamp.

Reform is not the same as relief

The natural reading of headlines like these is that the queue problem is being solved — that reform, once it lands, means the wait is effectively over. That reading gets the timeline wrong. Early signs of improvement in processing data and a stakeholder-endorsed procurement model are leading indicators about which regions are worth prioritizing for site selection. They are not evidence that multi-year timeline risk has disappeared for a project entering a queue today.

Read the signal, not the headline

In Surge's view, the queue is not one problem. It is several problems stacked together — interconnection study backlogs, network-upgrade cost allocation, and a first-come sequencing model that was never designed for the current volume of applications. When one project in a shared study cluster drops out, the cost allocations behind it can cascade, forcing restudies that ripple through everything downstream. Reform efforts like PJM's backstop procurement model are attempts to triage that stack region by region. They are not a system-wide fix, and treating them as one is the most common mistake developers make when reading queue-reform coverage.

What this changes, and for whom

For developers, the practical implication is that queue-reform news should inform where to prioritize site selection and capital, not whether to relax interconnection diligence generally. A region moving to backstop procurement or a cluster-study model is signaling that its queue is being actively managed — which is useful information, but it is regional, not universal. For capital partners, queue position and the specific reform status of the relevant ISO or utility should be treated as a durability question in diligence: how has this region's queue mechanics changed, and how might they change again before the project reaches operation? For landowners and developers alike, the FERC decision on the PJM fast-track waiver is a reminder that even a project trying to use an accelerated track can be bounced — "fast-track" describes a process, not a guarantee.

Underwriting the queue like a market, not a formality

A better operating model treats interconnection timing as a live variable to be tracked with the same rigor applied to financing terms or offtake pricing — not a procedural box to check once at the start of development. That means monitoring region-specific reform status (a project in a backstop-procurement region faces a different risk profile than one in a region still running "connect and manage"), pricing realistic queue timelines into site-selection and capital decisions from the outset, and treating withdrawal rates and restudy risk as underwriting inputs rather than footnotes.

The queue is the market now

The interconnection queue is no longer a waiting room outside the real business of development. For a growing share of U.S. clean-energy capacity, it is the business — and the projects that move are the ones underwritten against that reality from the first site-selection conversation, not the ones hoping the next reform headline changes their timeline for them.