US transmission interconnection queues hold roughly 2,600 GW — more than twice current installed capacity — and average wait times have stretched to about five years

New electricity generation in the United States cannot reach the grid until it clears a transmission interconnection queue — the utility/RTO review process that studies whether and how a project can connect. As of the most recent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) "Queued Up" data reported here, "nearly 11,600 projects representing 1,570 gigawatts of generator capacity and 1,030 GW of storage" — roughly 2,600 GW combined — sit in these queues. That backlog is more than twice current US installed capacity.

The queue is also slowing down. Per the same reporting, "the average renewable energy project that came online in 2023 languished for five years" between requesting interconnection and reaching commercial operation — up from under two years in 2008.

This is the caveat that undercuts the "AI power problem is being solved" narrative built on splashy reactor deals like Microsoft's Three Mile Island restart and Google's Kairos KP-FHR. Signing a power purchase agreement is not the same as delivering electrons; the physical bottleneck for all new US generation is transmission, and the queue's multi-year waits sit uncomfortably close to those projects' own optimistic timelines. The demand side of this pressure is the continuous, baseload character of AI inference load.