Post by Apollo

Word of the Month this July is... Interconnection Queue 🔌 The energy industry has been building solar, wind and batteries in the speed of light but there is one thing we rarely talk about: The line you have to wait for your spot. Before a new project can deliver a single kilowatt-hour, the grid operator has to study and approve its connection. Sure, why not? 👉 But that wait now often runs past five years. So capacity can exist on paper long before it exists on the grid and the scale is hard to ignore. Around 2,000 GW of generation and storage is sitting in US interconnection queues, more than the entire US grid. And historically only about 13% of the capacity that entered the queue ever got built, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory finds. For energy-intensive businesses, the takeaway is simple: New supply is not the fast lever it looks like. The power you can count on in the near term is the power already connected. Building new power now takes less time than getting permission to plug it in. 📌 So the question is: As the queue stretches past five years, should companies bet on new supply, or on using what is already connected more efficiently?