Why Getting Power Takes Years
The interconnection queue is where ambition meets engineering. It costs little to ask for a connection and a great deal to earn one, and for two decades the rules let speculative requests crowd out serious ones. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Queued Up reports document the result: far more capacity waiting than will ever be built, and median waits that have more than doubled. FERC's Order No. 2023 tried to price the option of holding a place in line, and in 2026 FERC turned to the parallel question of large loads. Faraday's read is that a region's large-load process, and whether it is published and predictable, now matters as much to a data center as the price of power itself.
Knowledge check
Why did first come, first served queue rules tend to make interconnection slower rather than fairer?
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Holding a place in line was cheap, so developers filed many speculative requests, and each study assumed that earlier projects would be built. When those projects withdrew, later studies had to be redone. FERC's Order No. 2023 responded by moving to annual cluster studies with readiness requirements and rising deposits.