The Interconnection Queue: The Line Everything Waits In
There was only one pass through the mountains, and so everything that wished to cross — armies, merchants, kings and thieves alike — came at last to the same narrow gate, and waited. The road beyond was empty. The road before it stretched back further than anyone could see.
What the Queue Actually Is
Before any power plant, wind farm, battery or data centre can plug into the grid, the grid operator has to study what connecting it would do — whether the surrounding wires can carry the extra load, and what upgrades would be needed to keep the system stable. That study, and the wait to receive it, is the interconnection queue. Nothing connects until it clears.
The study is not a formality. It determines the single most important number in a project’s budget: the cost of the network upgrades required to accommodate it — which can range from trivial to project-killing, and which the developer usually has to pay. Until the study is done, that cost is unknown, financing can’t close, and the project can’t proceed. The queue, in other words, is where a project’s economics are decided by someone other than its owner — and where most projects quietly die.
This piece is a hub: several other posts in Bifrost Systems — the AI demand shock, the colocation bypass, grid modernisation, second-life assets — all run into this same wall. Rather than re-explain it each time, this is the reference. If you understand the queue, you understand why so much of the infrastructure decade moves in slow motion.
Why It Broke
For decades, the queue worked on a “first-come, first-served” basis: projects were studied one at a time, in the order they applied. That was fine when a handful of large power plants joined the grid each year. It fell apart when tens of thousands of smaller solar, wind and storage projects — cheap to propose, easy to file speculatively — flooded in at once.
Two design flaws turned a backlog into gridlock. First, cascading restudies: because each project’s upgrade costs depended on everything ahead of it, whenever a higher-placed project withdrew, everything behind it had to be studied again, resetting the clock. Second, speculative squatting: with little cost to hold a place in line, developers filed far more projects than they intended to build, clogging the queue with applications that were never real. The result is a queue full of “zombie” projects — occupying position, triggering restudies, and never intending to connect.
The attrition is the part outsiders miss. The headline queue figure — 2,200 gigawatts, larger than everything currently plugged in — wildly overstates what will actually get built, because most of it never does.
The gross queue number is a trap. Because roughly four in five projects withdraw, a 2,200 GW queue does not mean 2,200 GW of coming supply — it means intense congestion around a much smaller pool of viable projects. The analytical work is separating the real from the speculative: a project with site control, financing and a completed study is worth far more than its queue position suggests, and a queue full of zombies is worth far less. Never take a queue figure at face value.
The Fix — and Its Limits
In July 2023, FERC issued Order No. 2023, described by the commission as its largest interconnection reform in two decades. Its central move was to replace “first-come, first-served” with “first-ready, first-served.” Instead of studying projects one by one in filing order, grid operators now study them in clusters, all at once, and prioritise the ones that can demonstrate genuine commercial readiness — site control, financial deposits, real intent to build. The reform also imposes firm study deadlines, with financial penalties on grid operators that miss them.
The logic is sound: cluster studies stop the cascading restudies, and readiness requirements price the zombies out. But the rollout has been slow and uneven. FERC had to order PJM — the largest US grid operator, serving 65 million people — to redo its compliance plan in 2025 for not meeting the rule. Regions are now layering on their own expedited “fast lanes” for shovel-ready projects: PJM’s expedited track (accepted mid-2026) targets a roughly ten-month path to a signed agreement, and MISO and SPP have their own accelerated study processes. Even so, the backlog has kept growing, swollen by a wave of new solar-plus-storage applications.
Order 2023 changed what wins a place in line: from who filed first, to who is actually ready to build.
That is a profound shift in who the queue rewards. Under the old rules, an early speculative filing beat a later serious project. Under the new rules, a well-capitalised developer with site control and financing can leapfrog the zombies. The reform doesn’t add grid capacity — only new wires do that — but it re-sorts the line in favour of the credible, which is its own kind of competitive advantage.
Reading It Through the Frameworks
This is the canonical test of the primer’s central question, so it’s worth working through carefully — the logic recurs across the whole section.
Is the queue a structural moat, or a temporary bottleneck?
The answer is: both, for different people, and that is the whole trade. For a developer without a position, the queue is a bottleneck — a years-long tax on getting anything built. But for an incumbent that already holds a completed study, an interconnected brownfield site, or firm capacity at a connected point, the queue is a moat — a multi-year barrier no competitor can cross quickly at any price. The same wall that traps the outsider protects the insider. The durable value clusters with whoever is already through the gate.
That reframing explains several other pieces in this section at once. It is why colocation exists — the bypass is an attempt to avoid the queue entirely. It is why a retired coal or gas site is valuable beyond its hardware — the interconnection rights come with it. And it is why the relief technologies (reconductoring, grid-enhancing tech) are an investable theme in their own right: anything that moves more power through existing, already-connected wires sidesteps the queue by definition.
The Investment Map
If the scarce thing is an interconnected position, the map follows directly — and it splits cleanly into owning the scarcity versus owning its relief.
In a queue-constrained grid, the interconnection position is frequently worth more than the project attached to it. That is why deals increasingly change hands for the connection rights alone, and why the reform — by making those rights harder to acquire speculatively — raises the value of the ones that already exist. Own the position, or own the technology that makes the position unnecessary. Owning neither means waiting in a line that most projects never leave.
The interconnection queue is the single most important bottleneck in the Western power system, and the quiet reason so much of the infrastructure build-out moves slowly. More capacity waits in it than exists on the grid — but four in five of those projects will never connect, so the gross number misleads more than it informs. The reform re-sorts the line toward the ready; it does not shorten it.
Hold the one idea this hub exists to establish: the queue is a bottleneck for outsiders and a moat for insiders, and the durable value sits with whoever is already through the gate — or who sells the means to avoid it. Every time another Bifrost piece runs into this wall, that is the lens to bring.
The tolls of the pass made its keepers richer than the kings whose armies waited there. They had built nothing, grown nothing, mined nothing. They had simply arrived at the gate first, and never left it.
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