FERC interconnection queue backlog forces solar and wind developers to wait 5 years just to connect to the grid

As of end-2024, approximately 2,300 GW of generation and storage capacity sat in U.S. interconnection queues -- nearly double the entire installed U.S. generation fleet -- with median time from interconnection request to commercial operation reaching 5 years. Only 13% of projects that entered the queue between 2000-2019 ever reached commercial operation; 77% were withdrawn. Why it matters: Developers who have secured land, financing, and equipment for a solar or wind farm cannot generate a single kilowatt-hour until the grid operator completes an interconnection study, so projects sit idle burning through capital for years. Capital sitting idle means investors demand higher returns to compensate for the delay risk, so the cost of financing renewable projects rises. Higher financing costs get passed through to power purchase agreement prices, so ratepayers and corporate buyers pay more for clean energy than they should. More expensive clean energy slows adoption, so grid decarbonization falls behind schedule. Falling behind schedule means utilities must keep aging fossil plants running longer than planned, increasing both emissions and maintenance costs for equipment that was supposed to be retired. The structural root cause is that interconnection study processes were designed for an era when a few large power plants connected per year, not for thousands of distributed solar, wind, and storage projects. FERC Order 2023 attempted to fix this with cluster-based studies and 'first-ready, first-served' criteria, but implementation timelines stretch to 2025-2028 across different ISOs, and PJM alone pushed full Order 2222 DER aggregation implementation to February 2028.