778 GW is stuck in interconnection queues right now, and most of it is clean energy

Right now, in our tracked dataset alone, 778 GW of generation and storage capacity (1,657 projects, 250 MW and up) is sitting in an active interconnection queue somewhere in the U.S., waiting for its grid operator to finish studying whether — and at what cost — it can actually connect. The median project in that queue right now has already been waiting 2.4 years, and that clock doesn’t stop when a project also has to clear a state permitting process on top of it.

The chart above groups every currently-active queue position by the year it entered. Read it carefully: part of that shape is real growth in new interconnection requests, but part of it is survivorship — a project that entered the queue in 2018 and is still “active” seven years later is increasingly rare, because most projects from that far back have by now either been built, withdrawn, or suspended and dropped out of the “active” count entirely. What the chart reliably shows is the size of today’s live backlog and roughly when it accumulated, not a clean historical arrival rate.

The backlog isn’t spread evenly: West alone accounts for 234 GW of it, more than any other single grid region we track. And it’s overwhelmingly not the resource type driving new permitting filings. Our other post found gas at 41% of newly-filed generation capacity in 2025 — but gas plants mostly skip this queue entirely, since they don’t need the same grid-scale studies a large new wind, solar, or storage interconnection does. Solar, wind, and storage together make up 72.6% of the capacity stuck in the active queue right now. The two trends aren’t a coincidence: when interconnection is the bottleneck, the option that doesn’t have to wait for it wins new filings, regardless of cost or emissions.

Every project behind this chart, with its real queue entry date and source, on Projects.