---
title: "Do LBNL's 'Queued Up' primary figures confirm the ~2,600 GW queue total and ~5-year median interconnection time?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
progress_log: ["2026-07-14: [[claim-us-interconnection-queue-exceeds-installed-capacity]] now has the ~2,600 GW total (1,570 GW generation + 1,030 GW storage), the 2×-installed-capacity framing, and the 5-yr-in-2023-vs-under-2-in-2008 wait re-confirmed verbatim against Latitude Media (Tier 2), with the wording corrected from 'median' to 'average.' Still open: the LBNL 'Queued Up' primary (emp.lbl.gov) remains unfetched (HTTP 403), so the edition/data-year vintage and whether the underlying wait figure is a median or a mean are unresolved; note carries [unverified-quant — needs primary]."]
date_raised: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["energy","grid","interconnection","verification","quant"]
---


[[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.