Before a new power plant, solar farm, or battery can connect to the electric grid, its developer has to apply to join the interconnection queue. Grid operators use that queue to study how the new project will affect and possibly destabilize the existing system. Until a project clears that study, it can't connect, no matter how ready it is to build. This map shows the withdrawal rate by county for requests old enough to have a known outcome - those that entered the queue between 2003 and 2020. The color scale below runs light orange to deep red indicating the darker red a county is, the higher overall withdrawl rate. The lightest shade starts at 30% withdrawn, and the best-performing region overall (Texas's grid) still sits at 47%. Continue scrolling to read more.
Of the 37,984 requests filed since 2000, most have already resolved one way or another. There are 8,394 active requests waiting in line right now. That's 1,851 gigawatts of proposed capacity, not built capacity. This map shows the total Megawatts queued by county. "Active" here means still in line, not yet approved, not yet operating. A handful of places, led by Arizona, California, and Nevada with pockets in Texas and the Pacific Northwest, are carrying most of that pending total.
It takes several years on average for potential energy projects to resolve by either being completed or withdrawn from the queue. Recent cohort years look artificially healthy simply because most of them haven't had time to fail yet, not because they're actually succeeding more often. Of the requests between 2003 and 2020, 71% were withdrawn without ever generating a watt. Data from the 2021 cohort and later are deliberately left out of the analysis.
Withdrawal rate varies more by where a project applies than almost anything else in this data. CAISO, California's grid operator, withdraws 77% of what enters its queue which is the the highest of any region.
ERCOT, Texas's largely self-contained grid, withdraws only 47% of what enters its queue which is the lowest of any region, and roughly 30 points below CAISO. ERCOT and CAISO actual governing boundaries are not shown in this data.
Maricopa County, Arizona (metro Phoenix) is currently carrying 32.2 gigawatts of active requests, more than any other county in the country.
Wilbarger County, Texas is home to the single largest project ever withdrawn from the queue: a 4,000-megawatt wind farm proposed in 2008 that never got built.
If we group every request into cohorts by the year it entered the queue and track what happenes we see the withdrawn share climbs for a few years, then levels off. 2003–2020 cohorts all land in roughly the same 60–86% range once they've had time to resolve. The lighter bars on the right are 2021–2025 and deliberately differentiated because it is still too recent to compare against the rest of the cohort years.
The mix of what developers are proposing has flipped. In 2010, 79% of new requests were solar or wind with no storage attached. By 2025, that share had fallen to 37%, while storage-only and hybrid gen-plus-storage projects grew from almost nothing to over 40% of everything filed.
Share of new requests each year, by generation type.
A project that succeeds takes a median of 3.6 years from application to commercial operation. One that fails still takes 1.6 years to reach a withdrawal. Neither outcome is fast and the underlying reason 2021–2025 cohorts weren't part of the 71% figure earlier.
Time from application to a final outcome. The dot marks the median and the bar spans the 10th–90th percentile.
Developers currently have 1,851 gigawatts of new generation and storage proposed and waiting in line. That doesn't mean 71% of today's 1,851 GW specifically will fail but most of it is too recent to have resolved either way. But the historical base rate for projects like it is not favorable: of requests old enough to have a known outcome, around 71% ended in withdrawal rather than a working plant. What does get built takes years either way, the mix has shifted toward storage, and where a project files matters as much as what it is. The interconnection queue is one piece of the enormous puzzle that is the US electric grid. For how the grid itself is organized - the utilities, markets, and regions this queue feeds into see how the US electric grid is organized.
of all withdrawals happened after the project had already signed an interconnection agreement which is a genuinely late-stage exit.
The 1,851 GW currently queued is 1.3 times the entire installed generating capacity of the United States (1,399 GW). The queue on its own is bigger than the grid it's trying to join.
Texas leads every state in active queued capacity, at 435 gigawatts, nearly a quarter of the entire nation's 1,851 GW pending total, from one state alone.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, "Queued Up" - U.S. Interconnection Queue Data Through 2025. Compiled in collaboration with Interconnection.fyi. Data through December 31, 2025.
Source: emp.lbl.gov/queues
U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-860M, Inventory of Operating Generators. Data as of May 2026.
Source: eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m
U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line Shapefiles, 2020 Cartographic Boundary Files (Counties, 500k resolution).
Source: census.gov