WaitingForPower

Methodology

How the numbers on this site are computed, what they assume, and where they’re deliberately incomplete.

Days / years waiting

today − application/interconnection-request filed date, computed live on every page load (not cached), so it’s always current. Where a source didn’t publish an exact filing date, the project is marked dateConfidence: approximate and the underlying date is our best reading of public reporting — see each project’s “data quality note.”

Estimated investment waiting

For generation and storage projects with capacity measured in MW and a fuel type with a published typical construction cost:

estimated investment waiting
  = capacity (MW) × 1,000 (kW/MW)
  × typical overnight construction cost for that technology ($/kW)

This is the estimated dollar value of the power plant itself — the capital investment an entrepreneur is ready to put into the ground — sitting in permitting or interconnection limbo. It needs only a project’s capacity and technology, not a filing date, so (unlike an energy-market or bill-savings estimate) it’s computable for nearly every generation/storage project in the dataset, not just the ones with a published application date. It is a construction-cost estimate, not a revenue forecast or a bill estimate, and real project costs vary by site, size, and year — this uses a single national-average figure per technology, not inflation-adjusted from its source year.

Construction costs used (2021$/kW)

  • Solar: $1,327/kW
  • Wind (onshore): $1,718/kW
  • Wind (offshore): $6,041/kW
  • Storage: $1,316/kW
  • Gas: $1,130/kW
  • Nuclear: $7,030/kW
  • Hydro: $3,083/kW
  • Geothermal: $3,076/kW

Source: EIA, “Cost and Performance Characteristics of New Generating Technologies,” Annual Energy Outlook 2022, Table 1 (national-average overnight capital costs, 2021 dollars).

What’s NOT estimated, and why

Transmission, pipeline, and LNG projects are not run through this formula. A transmission line’s cost is driven by route length and terrain, not a $/kW generation-capacity figure, and EIA’s table doesn’t cover it — we’d rather show “not estimated” than invent a proxy we couldn’t defend to the same standard.

Clean energy capacity waiting

A simple sum of MW capacity for matching projects using a zero-direct-emission technology — Solar, Wind (onshore), Wind (offshore), Nuclear, Hydro, Geothermal. It’s the same “Capacity waiting” total, just filtered to the zero-carbon subset — not an emissions or generation-value estimate, so it carries none of the assumptions those would.

Aggregate headline stats

Total capacity, total clean energy capacity, and total investment waiting sum only over projects in the current filtered set — they update live as you filter. Entries flagged isAggregateExample are always excluded from these totals, since they’d represent a regional statistic (e.g. an entire ISO interconnection queue) rather than one physical project and would double-count against individual projects also shown. No currently-ingested source produces one of these, but the exclusion stays in place for whenever one does.

Fields shown on this site

The list view, map, project detail pages, and CSV export all draw from the same underlying fields for every project:

  • Project — name, as published by the source (EIA plant/generator name, Permitting Dashboard project title, LBNL entity + queue ID, hydropower project name + FERC docket number, or pipeline project name + operator).
  • Fuel — technology/fuel type (solar, wind, storage, gas, nuclear, hydro, etc.), color-coded to match the map. Inferred from title keywords (not a structured field) for Permitting Dashboard-sourced projects — see that source’s note below.
  • Location — state and county. Most projects are geocoded to an exact site; LBNL-sourced projects are placed at their county centroid (see that source’s note below); a small number of Permitting Dashboard projects with no published coordinates, and every pipeline project (which span multiple states with no single site), won’t appear on the map at all.
  • Waiting — years since the published application-filed or interconnection-request date; see “Days / years waiting” above. Shows “—” when no source has published that date for the project.
  • Capacity — nameplate MW for generation/storage/transmission, MTPA for LNG, or MMcf/d of throughput for pipelines; see each project’s “data quality note” when the unit isn’t MW.
  • Stage — where the project sits in the permitting/interconnection process; see “Project stage” below for what each value means and which source can produce it.
  • Interconnection queue stage — finer-grained than Stage, and only shown for LBNL Queued Up-sourced projects: the grid operator’s own study-phase label (e.g. “Feasibility Study,” “System Impact Study,” “Facilities Study”), carried through rather than collapsed into the shared Stage bucket.
  • Network upgrade cost — a preliminary estimate of what it would cost to connect a project to the grid, where available. Reserved on the schema but not yet populated by any ingestion module — see “Data & sourcing” below.
  • Source — which of the data pipelines below ingested this project. Derived from the project’s citation link, not a stored field — see “Data & sourcing” below.

Every project also carries a verification status, one or more source links, and (where a source published one) a data quality note — all visible on the project’s own page, even when not shown as a column in the list view. CSV export additionally includes project type and cause category slugs, which aren’t shown as table columns.

Project stage

“Stage” is a single bucket meant to answer “roughly where is this project in the process?” at a glance. Two of the values below — Planned, approvals not yet initiated and Regulatory approvals pending (Category L) — map directly to status codes EIA-860M itself publishes on every “Planned” generator: EIA calls these (P) and (L) respectively, and (L) is EIA’s own “Category L” — “Regulatory approvals pending. Not under construction.” Every other stage below is a best-effort default assigned from whichever source ingested the project — see each source’s entry above for what it can and can’t tell us about a project’s real bottleneck.

  • Interconnection study
  • Environmental review
  • Planned, approvals not yet initiated
  • Regulatory approvals pending
  • Agency permitting
  • Local/state review
  • Litigation

The stages above are shown under the In Permitting Status filter only — the site’s default view, and the one this project count/capacity/investment math is scoped to. A project whose regulatory approval has already been granted, one that’s under construction or already complete, or one that was cancelled/withdrawn is kept, not deleted — switch Status to Permits Complete or Cancelled / Suspended to see those. (Before 2026-08-25, this site deleted a project once it resolved; that changed so resolved outcomes stay visible instead of disappearing.)

Data & sourcing

Every project on this site comes from one of the public data sources below, refreshed on an automated schedule (daily for most, weekly for a few — see below) — not a one-off, hand-picked list. Each source links out to the original public filing or reporting, not just this site’s own summary. We intentionally stick to sources we can keep current automatically; see the repo’s README if you’re curious why.

  • EIA-860M “Planned” generator inventory. U.S. Energy Information Administration, published monthly. The backbone list of proposed U.S. generation and storage capacity — location, capacity, technology, and status for every planned generator above a 250 MW capacity floor. We exclude generators already reported under construction, since this site tracks projects still waiting for approval, not ones that have already cleared that hurdle. EIA’s own status codes for the rest of the pipeline map directly to this site’s stage values — see “Project stage” above, including “Category L.”
  • Federal Permitting Dashboard (FAST-41 covered projects). Permitting Council data on major energy generation, transmission, storage, and pipeline projects undergoing federal environmental review — including which federal agency is in the lead. We exclude projects already marked Complete or Cancelled.
  • LBNL Queued Up (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in partnership with GridTracker), published annually. An interconnection queue dataset aggregated from 50+ grid operators — the only source on this site that publishes a real date each project entered the queue, which is what most of the “time waiting” figures on this site are built from. We include only requests with an active queue status and at least 250 MW of capacity, matching the site-wide capacity floor also used for EIA-860M. A suspended interconnection request is treated the same as withdrawn — not shown as “waiting” — and a project that moves to withdrawn, suspended, or already- operational status in a later edition is removed the moment that’s reported, rather than staying frozen in its last-known state. Also the source of this site’s “interconnection queue stage” detail (see “Fields shown on this site” above); a separate LBNL dataset with per-project network-upgrade cost estimates exists but isn’t yet wired in — see the repo README’s open questions. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
  • ORNL HydroSource hydropower relicensing dataset (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, built from FERC’s own relicensing docket data), published annually. Every FERC-licensed hydropower project currently in relicensing — either an application already pending before FERC, or a licensee that has filed its required notice of intent to relicense but not yet the full application. Publishes a real per-project filing date and exact coordinates, so (like LBNL Queued Up) contributes real “time waiting” figures. We exclude projects whose relicense has already been issued, and license-surrender applications (a project leaving FERC’s process, not waiting on approval within it). Contributes far fewer projects than the other sources: most FERC-licensed hydro projects are small municipal or private dams below this site’s 250 MW floor.
  • EIA Natural Gas Pipeline Projects tracker, published quarterly. An analyst-maintained list of announced, filed, and on-hold interstate and intrastate natural gas pipeline projects — the main source of pipeline coverage on this site, broader than the handful of pipeline projects that happen to be FAST-41 “covered projects” on the Permitting Dashboard. No capacity floor is applied (this workbook is itself a curated list of major projects, not a raw firehose) and capacity is reported in MMcf/d of gas throughput, not MW, so it’s excluded from this site’s MW-based capacity totals. Pipelines span multiple states with no single site, so these projects have no map coordinates and won’t appear on the map, only in the list view. No application-filed date is published, so “time waiting” isn’t computable for these projects either.

Because EIA-860M, the Permitting Dashboard, and the pipeline tracker don’t publish an application-filed or queue-entry date, projects sourced only from those three won’t show a “time waiting” figure unless LBNL Queued Up or ORNL’s hydropower relicensing dataset also has a matching entry.

State PUC/PSC and siting-authority dockets

No national aggregator exists for state utility-commission dockets — each state runs its own system, and FERC eLibrary only covers the federal side. This site is building per-state coverage one confirmed source at a time, each a real, publicly reachable search (a JSON API or server-rendered HTML page) rather than a headless-browser scrape or a paid API. Every state below tracks a real siting-certificate application (each state’s own name for the “Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity” concept) for electric generation, storage, or transmission projects; none publishes a cause for the delay, so — like the sources above — these are all tagged with a single, honest cause category (“local/state review”) rather than a guessed reason. See the repo’s src/lib/ingest/README.md for the specific hard problem each one solved (an unreliable status field, a scoping trap, a session/CAPTCHA hurdle, etc.).

Not exactly geocoded: state-docket sources publish a county, not exact coordinates, so these projects appear on the map as an approximate, dashed-outline pin centered on their county (or, failing that, their state) rather than an exact site — see each project’s data quality note.

More states are coming — this is an active, ongoing expansion, not a finished list. See the repo’s README for the full list of open questions, including cross-source project identity matching and data source terms of use, flagged rather than silently guessed at.

How current is this data?

Every source above runs on an automated job (Vercel Cron) — there is no manual, hand-curated data on this site. Cadence is matched to how often each source actually publishes: the 40 state PUC/PSC/siting-authority dockets and the Federal Permitting Dashboard’s live API are checked daily, since same-day filings are exactly what the homepage changes feed is built to surface. The four sources whose underlying data only republishes monthly, quarterly, or annually (EIA-860M, LBNL Queued Up, ORNL HydroSource, EIA’s pipeline tracker) stay weekly — checking them more often wouldn’t catch anything new, just spend invocations for no benefit.

  • EIA-860M — checked weekly at 13:00 UTC. EIA itself republishes the “Planned” workbook monthly, with roughly a two-month publication lag on EIA’s end; most checks simply find the same file already ingested and no-op.
  • Federal Permitting Dashboard — checked daily at 14:00 UTC against a live queryable API, not a periodic file, so whatever the Permitting Council’s data reflects is picked up within a day.
  • LBNL Queued Up — checked weekly at 15:00 UTC. LBNL republishes this dataset only about once a year; a periodic check costs one cheap page fetch on the weeks nothing’s changed and still guarantees a new edition is picked up quickly after release rather than waiting on a manual download.
  • ORNL HydroSource hydropower relicensing — checked weekly at 16:00 UTC, same rationale as LBNL Queued Up: ORNL republishes this dataset about once a year too.
  • EIA Natural Gas Pipeline Projects tracker — checked weekly at 17:00 UTC. EIA republishes this one roughly quarterly; same rationale as the two annual sources above.
  • Virginia SCC — checked daily at 18:00 UTC.
  • Texas PUCT — checked daily at 18:30 UTC.
  • Colorado PUC — checked daily at 19:00 UTC.
  • Ohio Power Siting Board — checked daily at 19:30 UTC.
  • South Carolina PSC — checked daily at 20:00 UTC.
  • Arizona Corporation Commission — checked daily at 20:30 UTC.
  • Washington EFSEC — checked daily at 21:00 UTC.
  • New Mexico PRC — checked daily at 21:30 UTC.
  • Illinois Commerce Commission — checked daily at 22:00 UTC.
  • Florida PSC + DEP — checked daily at 22:30 UTC.
  • New York DPS — checked daily at 23:00 UTC.
  • Nevada PUCN — checked daily at 23:30 UTC.
  • Oregon EFSC — checked daily at 00:00 UTC.
  • Massachusetts EFSB — checked daily at 00:30 UTC.
  • Oklahoma OCC — checked daily at 01:00 UTC.
  • Utah PSC — checked daily at 01:30 UTC.
  • Wisconsin PSC — checked daily at 02:00 UTC.
  • Kentucky PSC — checked daily at 02:30 UTC.
  • Missouri PSC — checked daily at 03:00 UTC.
  • Indiana IURC — checked daily at 03:30 UTC.
  • New Jersey BPU — checked daily at 04:00 UTC.
  • Maryland PSC — checked daily at 04:30 UTC.
  • Connecticut CSC — checked daily at 05:00 UTC.
  • West Virginia PSC — checked daily at 05:30 UTC.
  • Tennessee TPUC — checked daily at 06:00 UTC.
  • California CEC — checked daily at 06:30 UTC.
  • New Hampshire SEC — checked daily at 07:00 UTC.
  • Idaho PUC — checked daily at 07:30 UTC.
  • Nebraska PRB — checked daily at 08:00 UTC.
  • Louisiana PSC — checked daily at 08:30 UTC.
  • Alabama PSC — checked daily at 09:00 UTC.
  • Arkansas PSC — checked daily at 09:30 UTC.
  • Delaware PSC — checked daily at 10:00 UTC.
  • Maine DEP — checked daily at 10:30 UTC.
  • Rhode Island EFSB — checked daily at 11:00 UTC.
  • Vermont PUC — checked daily at 11:30 UTC.
  • South Dakota PUC — checked daily at 12:00 UTC.
  • North Dakota PSC — checked daily at 12:30 UTC.
  • North Carolina Utilities Commission — checked daily at 13:30 UTC.
  • Wyoming DEQ Industrial Siting Council — checked daily at 14:30 UTC.

Forty-one sources run daily, every source staggered 30 minutes apart across the clock (13:00 UTC through 12:30 UTC the next day) so no two ingestion runs overlap; the four monthly/quarterly/annual sources above run on the same staggered schedule but only once a week. Every ingestion run upserts by a stable per-source identity, so re-running a source (on schedule or by hand) updates existing projects in place rather than duplicating them — including across two different sources that track the same physical project once a human has confirmed it and declared a shared identity (see the repo README’s open question on cross-source identity matching). “Days / years waiting” figures are computed live on every page load from the stored filing date, not cached, so they’re accurate to the minute even between ingestion runs.