Read it as a floor. Where our reading finds no machine-readable status field, every gigawatt counts as no signed agreement shown, only because we could not read it.
About 26% of the queue shows a signed agreement — a floor, not a forecast.302.1 of 1,177.7 GW shows an executed interconnection agreement, read from each queue’s own published status field. We treat it as a floor. Most of the rest has a readable status field but no executed agreement: read, and not signed. Capacity our reading cannot read stays outside the signed total, only because it is unread. No signed agreement shown means only that the file shows none.
Where U.S. ISO/RTO generation interconnection queues publish a machine-readable interconnection-agreement status, the signed share our reading finds varies widely by queue — from 17% to 81% across the 6 queues where our reading yields a meaningful signed share (CAISO, ISO-NE, SPP, ERCOT, NYISO and PJM); the figure for each queue, with the rule we read it by, is at /verify. Those shares are not a maturity ranking and should not be read against each other: each one reflects its own queue’s disclosure practice and market design. In 1 further queue (MISO) the active list shows almost no executed agreements, so the share there is not comparable with the shares above; the reason for each queue is at /verify. Across all 7 queues (50 MW and up), 1,177.7 GW is requested — a total that is not deduplicated, since one project can appear more than once while it shops utilities or points of interconnection — and 302.1 GW of it shows an executed interconnection agreement in the operator’s own queue file. That is 25.7% of the requested total, and we treat it as a floor: the signed capacity we can count comes only from the queues with a readable status field, while the total covers all 7. We do not estimate how far above that floor the real share sits. A queue position is an early-stage signal in any case: of the capacity that entered U.S. queues from 2000 to 2020, 13% had reached commercial operation by the end of 2025 and 75% had been withdrawn (LBNL, ‘Queued Up: 2026 Edition’, p.55) — a cohort from before FERC’s 2023 reform, so it describes history, not a forecast for today’s queue.
This is the GENERATION interconnection queue — power plants and storage seeking to connect to serve future load growth, of which AI data centers are one driver — not data-center (large-load) requests, which most ISOs do not publish. ‘Signed’ means OUR consistent reading of each queue’s own published status field (e.g. CAISO’s ‘Interconnection Agreement Status: Executed’, SPP’s ‘IA FULLY EXECUTED’), including projects already under construction — which require an executed agreement; it is not a certified or audited figure. Status taxonomies differ by ISO, so per-queue shares are not directly comparable, and a near-zero share can be queue design rather than weakness. ERCOT runs a connect-and-manage regime outside FERC’s interconnection jurisdiction; its queue report gives each project an ‘IA Signed’ date, and we count a project as signed from that date until it is approved for synchronization. In ERCOT an agreement can be signed while the full interconnection study is still under way, so a signed ERCOT project may be earlier in development than a signed project in a FERC-jurisdictional queue. PJM publishes Cycle 1 and its two transition cycles in a separate file from its older serial queue; we read both, count only generation requests, and size each request by the larger of its MW Energy and MW Capacity rather than by the whole facility. ERCOT lists a repowered plant at its full size after the repower, and we count it as listed. MISO’s near-zero share is a queue-lifecycle artifact: MISO’s own queue legend defines Active as a project still ‘under the study cycle’ and Done as one that ‘has completed all the studies’, after which agreement negotiation begins — so an active MISO request is by definition still in study, and almost none shows a post-agreement stage. That is not a read on project maturity and not evidence of speculation. An unverified request is NOT a phantom: a queue request is unsigned until it signs, and status is graded (FERC Order No. 2023 replaced serial first-come with first-ready cluster studies). The raw queue is not deduplicated; the same project can appear more than once. Historically most queued generation never reaches operation: of the capacity that requested interconnection from 2000 to 2020, 13% reached commercial operation by the end of 2025, 75% was withdrawn and 10% was still active (LBNL, ‘Queued Up: 2026 Edition’, p.55; by project count rather than capacity the completion figure is 19%, p.4). That cohort ran under the serial regime Order 2023 has since replaced, so it benchmarks history rather than this queue — which is why we report what carries a signed agreement today instead of forecasting what will be built. Descriptive of today, not a forecast.