The Bottleneck Is the Wire
Follow a stuck queue to its root and you almost always find a shortage of wire, not of electrons. A power plant is a project on a single site you can buy. A transmission line is a decade-long act of coordination across every landowner, jurisdiction, and environmental feature between two points, dependent on transformers that take years to build. That asymmetry is the whole story: generation is modular and fast, transmission is linear, bespoke, and slow, so generation piles into the queue faster than wires can carry it. Price the wire, not just the electrons, and you will understand why the grid, not the plant, sets the pace at which new load arrives.
Knowledge check
Why can the industry build generation so much faster than the transmission needed to carry that generation?
Show the answer
Generation is modular and site-contained: it is a repeated unit on a single parcel with one interconnection point, so it enjoys factory learning and needs only local agreement. Transmission is linear and bespoke, spanning many parcels and jurisdictions, requiring a continuous right-of-way and multi-year equipment, and its system-wide power-flow effects make its planning, permitting, and cost allocation contested. So the wire moves at a fraction of generation's speed.