Methodology

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.

Data & sourcing

Every project on this site comes from one of the public data sources below, refreshed on a daily automated schedule — 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.
• 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 100 MW of capacity. Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Because EIA-860M and the Permitting Dashboard don’t publish an application-filed or queue-entry date, projects sourced only from those two won’t show a “time waiting” figure unless LBNL Queued Up also has a matching interconnection request.

More sources are coming soon — our data and coverage are always growing, check back soon. 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.