2,600 GW of solar/wind projects are stuck in a 5-year interconnection queue, costing consumers billions
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Solar, wind, and battery storage developers must wait a median of five years in the U.S. grid interconnection queue before they can connect to the grid. Over 2,600 GW of generation capacity is currently waiting, with 95% being renewables. A record 112 GW of solar and storage withdrew from the queue in 2024 alone. So what? Developers burn through project financing during the wait, with carrying costs often killing project economics before a single electron is generated. So what? Viable renewable projects die, meaning utilities must continue running expensive fossil fuel plants to meet growing demand. So what? Electricity consumers pay more: analysis shows that connecting just 10% of queued renewables before 2024 would have saved PJM consumers $3.5 billion. So what? Data center operators, who need clean power for AI workloads, cannot secure renewable energy PPAs on their timelines, threatening corporate climate commitments. So what? The U.S. falls further behind its decarbonization targets while electricity demand surges from AI, EVs, and electrification. The bottleneck persists because transmission planning is balkanized across regional operators, interconnection studies are sequential rather than clustered, and there is no financial penalty for utilities that process queues slowly.
Evidence
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab tracks the queue at 2,600 GW with a 5-year median wait (https://emp.lbl.gov/queues). University of Chicago analysis documents $3.5B in consumer savings lost to queue delays (https://sustainabilitydialogue.uchicago.edu/news/how-the-interconnection-queue-backlog-is-slowing-energy-growth/). Council on Foreign Relations details the structural barriers (https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-interconnection-challenge-why-renewables-are-stuck-line).