The US interconnection queue posted its first year-over-year decline in at least a decade in 2025, falling from a 2,600 GW peak in 2023 to approximately 2,300 GW, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Queued Up tracker. The decline followed FERC’s issuance of compliance rulings throughout 2025 on Order 2023, its July 2023 overhaul of generator interconnection rules, which mandated a shift from serial to cluster-based studies and first-ready-first-served processing.
Order 2023 was designed to address the core dysfunction of the prior queue: projects could hold queue position with minimal financial commitment, creating phantom demand that blocked real projects from getting studies completed. The new cluster process groups projects by geography and study cycle, forces simultaneous study of competing applications, and requires escalating financial commitments that screen out non-serious applicants. The 300 GW decline in the queue represents projects that withdrew rather than meet the new requirements or pay their share of network upgrade costs under cluster studies.
Approximately 2,060 GW of capacity remains actively seeking interconnection as of late 2025, overwhelmingly solar, wind, and storage. The queue still represents orders of magnitude more capacity than will be built, but the first decline in a decade is a signal that the process reform is functioning at a basic level. The projects that survive the cluster process and complete interconnection agreements in 2026-2027 represent the most credible read on what actually gets built in the early 2030s.