Do LBNL's 'Queued Up' primary figures confirm the ~2,600 GW queue total and ~5-year median interconnection time?
claim-us-interconnection-queue-exceeds-installed-capacity rests on Latitude Media (Tier 2) reproducing Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's "Queued Up" study. The LBNL primary (emp.lbl.gov) could not be fetched during the 2026-07-09 capture session, so the load-bearing numbers are secondary-confirmed only. This is a quantitative claim and the sourcing floor requires Tier 1–2 primary verification.
Specific verifications needed:
- Pull the LBNL "Queued Up" primary (emp.lbl.gov / Berkeley Lab Electricity Markets & Policy group). Confirm the headline totals: "nearly 11,600 projects representing 1,570 gigawatts of generator capacity and 1,030 GW of storage" (~2,600 GW combined).
- Confirm the vintage. Which "Queued Up" edition and data year do these figures come from (the series updates roughly annually)? The claim as written implies end-of-2023 data — verify the exact snapshot.
- Confirm the timing figures. The "~5 years median for projects online in 2023, up from under 2 years in 2008" wait-time claim — is that the median or the mean, and is it typical-project or renewable-specific? The capture's phrasing ("average renewable energy project") is ambiguous between mean and median.
- Confirm the framing. That the queue total exceeds current US installed capacity by ~2×.
Why it matters: this figure is the analytical hinge of the AI-power-demand-meets-grid-bottleneck thread — the claim that the real constraint on serving AI load is interconnection, not generation. If the numbers hold against the LBNL primary, the note can move off seedling; if not, the framing needs correcting.