Meridian

Author: Dana Whitfield

  • FERC opens emergency review of three interconnection queues

    FERC opens emergency review of three interconnection queues

    The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order on Tuesday opening an expedited review of interconnection study timelines at PJM, MISO and ERCOT, giving each operator ninety days to justify processes that now average close to four years from request to executed agreement.

    The order is unusual in its framing. Rather than proposing a rule, the Commission has asked the three operators to demonstrate that their current timelines are consistent with the obligation to provide interconnection service on terms that are not unduly discriminatory — an obligation that has been in statute since 1935 and rarely invoked against processing delay.

    Two commissioners wrote separately. The concurrence argued the review should extend to all regional operators rather than the three with the largest queues. The dissent argued that the Commission’s own 2023 reform order has not been fully implemented and that a second proceeding will divert staff from the first.

    Grid operators have consistently attributed the backlog to volume rather than process, noting that request volume has increased roughly sevenfold since 2018 while study staff has roughly doubled. That defence is factually correct and, in the Commission’s framing, beside the point.

    Comments are due in ninety days. Whatever the Commission decides, no project currently in a queue will connect sooner because of it.

  • The Grid Can’t Wait

    The Grid Can’t Wait

    The interconnection queue in PJM’s territory now holds more proposed generation capacity than the entire installed fleet of Germany. Almost none of it will be built this decade.

    That sentence is easy to write and hard to absorb. PJM coordinates electricity across thirteen states and the District of Columbia, a footprint that includes the densest concentration of data centres on earth. Its queue is not a waiting list in any ordinary sense. It is a filing cabinet of intentions, most of which will be abandoned before anyone pours concrete.

    What the queue actually measures

    A queue position is not a power plant. It is a request for a study — a formal ask that the grid operator model what happens to voltage, thermal limits and system stability if a given generator connects at a given point on the network. The study takes years. Most requests are withdrawn before it finishes, which means the studies must be redone, which means the next round takes longer than the last.

    Engineers call this the restudy problem. Everyone in the industry has known about it since at least 2019. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered reforms in 2023. The queues have grown every year since.

    We are not short of projects. We are short of the ability to say yes to them in a reasonable amount of time.

    The gap between requests and completions is the number that matters, and it has been widening every year since 2018. In 2016 a typical interconnection study in PJM took roughly eighteen months. The current average is closer to four years, and the projects entering the queue today are larger and more complex than the ones that entered it then.

    The county-level view

    Loudoun County, Virginia, is the clearest case. Eleven data centres there are waiting on a single substation upgrade that was first proposed in 2019. The upgrade is now scheduled for 2029. In the intervening decade the county has approved construction permits for facilities whose combined draw would exceed the peak demand of the city of Phoenix.

    None of this is secret. The permits are public, the queue is public, the substation schedule is public. What is missing is any single body whose job it is to notice that the three documents contradict each other.

    Three constraints, in order

    Transformers first. A large power transformer is a bespoke object — designed for a specific voltage, a specific site, a specific set of fault conditions — with a lead time that has stretched from eighteen months to four years. There are four factories in North America still building them at scale.

    Second, transmission right-of-way, which is a political problem wearing an engineering costume. A new interstate line crosses counties that receive none of the power and all of the towers. The approval process is designed to give those counties a voice, and it does.

    Third, and least discussed, the people. Commissioning a substation requires relay technicians and protection engineers, and the median age in both trades is above fifty. Utilities that ordered equipment in 2022 are now discovering they cannot staff the installation.

    None of these is solved by capital. All of them are solved by time, and time is the one input the AI buildout does not have.

  • Phoenix approved 40,000 homes. Its water plan covers 12,000.

    Phoenix approved 40,000 homes. Its water plan covers 12,000.

    Under Arizona law, a developer building in an active management area must obtain a certificate of assured water supply — a state finding that the development has access to enough water to last one hundred years. It is one of the strictest such requirements in the country, and Phoenix has issued certificates covering roughly 40,000 new homes since 2022.

    The city’s own water resources plan, published last year, models sufficient supply for approximately 12,000 of them under the drought scenario the state hydrologist now considers most likely.

    The discrepancy is not a secret and it is not a scandal. It is an artefact of two documents written for different purposes on different assumptions. The certificates rest on a groundwater model last comprehensively revised in 2019, before the Colorado River shortage declarations. The water resources plan uses post-declaration hydrology.

    What makes it consequential is that the certificates are not revocable. Once issued, they attach to the land. A developer who obtained one in 2022 and has not yet broken ground retains the right to build, and the city retains the obligation to serve.

    State legislators have introduced three bills in as many sessions that would allow retrospective review of certificates issued under superseded models. All three died in committee. The homebuilders’ association opposed each of them on the grounds that retroactive revocation would make Arizona land unfinanceable, which is true, and which is also the point.

    The practical resolution, according to two people in the city water department who were not authorised to speak publicly, is that the shortfall gets managed rather than solved: allocation cuts to agriculture, accelerated reclamation, and the purchase of tribal water rights at prices that have tripled since 2021.

  • The permitting bill is an infrastructure bill in disguise

    The permitting reform package moving through committee is described by its sponsors as a process bill: shorter environmental reviews, tighter judicial deadlines, a consolidated lead agency. Nothing in it appropriates money, which is the entire basis of its bipartisan support.

    It is an infrastructure bill. The reason nobody calls it one is that calling it one means paying for it.

    Consider what the bill actually requires. Shorter reviews demand more reviewers — the delay in a typical transmission review is not deliberation but queueing, and a queue clears faster only when it has more servers. Consolidated lead agency authority requires the lead agency to have staff competent in the disciplines it has just absorbed. Tighter judicial deadlines require courts that can meet them.

    None of these capacities exists at current staffing. The Bureau of Land Management’s renewable energy programme has lost roughly a fifth of its permitting staff since 2021. The Council on Environmental Quality has fewer analysts than it did in 2010.

    The honest version of this bill would pair every process change with the appropriation that makes it achievable. That bill would cost perhaps $2 billion a year, a trivial sum against the capital it would unlock, and it would fail, because the coalition holding the current version together is held together precisely by the absence of a number.

    So the bill will pass, and the deadlines will bind agencies that cannot meet them, and in three years there will be hearings about why permitting reform did not reduce permitting time.

  • Inside the substation that AI is waiting on

    Inside the substation that AI is waiting on

    The switchyard at Aldie sits behind three fences, and the third one is electrified. Inside it, on a Tuesday morning in July, four engineers are deciding what gets connected to the grid this year.

    The decision does not look like a decision. It looks like three people at a folding table with a laptop and a printed one-line diagram, arguing about whether a particular breaker can carry fault current from a source that does not exist yet.

    This film follows that argument for twelve minutes. It is not a documentary about artificial intelligence, though every question in it is downstream of the same buildout. It is about the specific and unglamorous work of connecting one thing to another thing safely, and about the small number of people qualified to do it.

    The engineers agreed to be filmed on the condition that nothing in the footage would identify the specific interconnection under review. Meridian agreed. The technical discussion has been left intact.

    Filmed at a transmission substation in Loudoun County, Virginia, over two days in July 2026.