How the LOADSTAR Number is computed

The one-line claim, straight from the single source that every LOADSTAR surface reads:
Of the 958.5 GW requested across the seven active U.S. ISO generation interconnection queues, at least 145.1 GW — about 15.1% — carries an executed interconnection agreement, based on data from the 4 queues that publish a usable status field (CAISO, ISONE, SPP and PJM). A floor, not a rate: what our reading cannot see counts as unverified, never as speculative.

Pull 686 active rows (50 MW and up) from SPP’s published queue → sum requested = 150.5 GW → apply the queue’s own status rule (“column «Status (Original)» begins with “IA FULLY EXECUTED”.”) → sum the rows that meet it = 60.7 GW → divide: 40% of SPP’s requested capacity carries an executed agreement — that queue’s floor. Redo it from the raw JSON: /api/v1/regions/queue-derate.

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future load growth, of which AI data centers are one driver — not data-center (large-load) requests, which most ISOs do not publish. ‘Verified’ means OUR consistent reading of each queue’s own published status field (e.g. CAISO’s ‘Interconnection Agreement Status: Executed’, MISO’s post-GIA stage), 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, and in its published data a project whose agreement is signed moves out of the active queue (it is listed as Completed) — so ERCOT’s active-queue signed share is near zero by construction, a queue-lifecycle artifact, not a read on project maturity. MISO’s near-zero share has a different cause, not a shared one: its post-generator-interconnection-agreement stage field is populated on only a small slice of its rows, so most of its queue carries no readable agreement status at all and cannot count as signed under our rule — an absence of data, not evidence of speculation. Where our reading finds no usable machine-readable field (currently NYISO), that says nothing about those ISOs’ disclosure — it may be our parsing limit — and those GW are counted as unverified, never as phantom. An unverified request is NOT a phantom: queues are unsigned by nature 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 (part of what FERC’s RM26-4 show-cause targets). 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.