2,824 Battery Storage Projects Are Waiting to Connect

There are 2,824 battery storage projects sitting in the U.S. interconnection queues we track, asking to connect a combined 442.0 GW to the grid. On the sealed snapshot of June 11, 2026, storage is the second-largest technology in line — behind only solar — and it carries the lowest withdrawal rate of any renewable bucket. That last point is the interesting one. Storage applicants leave the queue less often than solar or wind applicants do, which suggests the projects entering the line are, on average, more serious about reaching connection.

Read the shape, not just the total. A queue position is a request to connect, not a built, approved, or financed project, and storage is no exception — but 32.6% of storage entries are withdrawn, against 45.1% for solar. With 56.9% of storage projects still active in the queue and a median request of 154 MW, the storage pipeline looks less speculative and more committed than the solar field it usually pairs with. This report reads the national storage picture from one sealed day across 5 ISOs and RTOs.

Battery storage counts 2,824 projects and 442.0 GW across the covered queues.

This is a census of the published queues, not of every project on every grid in the country. Generation and storage projects sitting in the interconnection queues of the U.S. grid operators (ISOs and RTOs) that publish a machine-readable queue, as captured by US Tech Automations' sealed daily grid snapshots, define the scope. A queue is aspirational by nature, so nothing here is a forecast of what will be built.

Key Findings

• 2,824 battery storage projects are in the covered queues, the second-largest technology by count, according to the sealed interconnection-queue snapshot.

• Storage carries 442.0 GW of requested capacity, trailing only solar's 515.1 GW.

• The storage withdrawal rate is 32.6% — the lowest of any renewable bucket we track.

• ERCOT leads storage with 922 projects, the most of any single operator.

• The largest storage entry, ATLAS COMPLEX, is logged at 3,200 MW.

Reading the Storage Queue

Storage sits in a different posture from the rest of the renewable pipeline. The combination of high count, high capacity, and low withdrawal is what makes it stand out.

A battery storage project in an interconnection queue is a grid-scale system — racks of cells, inverters, and controls — that charges when power is cheap or plentiful and discharges when the grid needs it. The 154 MW median is squarely utility-scale, and ATLAS COMPLEX at 3,200 MW shows the upper bound. Storage frequently rides alongside solar because the pairing turns midday solar output into evening dispatchable power, which is why these two technologies dominate the queues together.

The 154 MW median is worth dwelling on. It runs higher than solar's 125 MW median, which tells you the typical storage applicant is not a small experiment but a serious, capital-intensive installation. Batteries also clear interconnection studies more easily than generation in some respects, because a battery can be configured to charge from the grid and limit its injection — a flexibility that makes operators more willing to approve the connection. That technical edge, layered on top of clear market revenue, is the structural reason storage stays in line where solar leaves.

The median battery storage request is 154 MW, a utility-scale figure.

How Storage Status Splits

Status is the honest read on a queue. Here storage looks healthier than its renewable siblings.

More than half of storage projects — 1,608 of them, or 56.9% — are still active in the queue, and only 922 have withdrawn. Just 4 read as operational, a reminder that queue presence and built capacity are different things entirely. The 290 unknown entries come from feeds that publish no status; do not count them as active. Among storage projects with a known status, 36.4% are withdrawn — still the gentlest churn in the renewable field.

Of storage projects with a known status, 36.4% are withdrawn — the lowest renewable churn.

Where the Storage Sits by Operator

ERCOT is the storage capital of the covered queues, and its overall queue confirms it: Battery Storage is ERCOT's top fuel.

ERCOT holds 922 storage projects and runs Battery Storage as its top fuel at a 50.1% share — storage is the majority story in Texas. No other operator leads with storage, which concentrates the technology heavily in one footprint. ERCOT's fast-track interconnection process and energy-only market design reward batteries that can arbitrage price swings, and the queue reflects that. The ERCOT interconnection queue report breaks down the Texas mix, and the Texas interconnection queue view covers the state cut.

That single-market concentration is itself a finding. When one operator holds the clear majority of a technology's projects, the technology's national fortunes are tethered to that operator's rules. A change to ERCOT's interconnection study process, its market design, or its grid conditions would move the storage picture more than any other single factor. Developers reading this should treat ERCOT not as one option among five but as the center of gravity for grid-scale storage in the covered queues — and watch its feed accordingly.

Storage Against the Other Technologies

Placed beside the other buckets, storage is second in scale and first in staying power.

Solar leads on count and capacity, but its 45.1% withdrawal rate dwarfs storage's 32.6%. Only Natural Gas, at 24.1%, churns less than storage — and gas has far fewer projects, just 522. Hybrid, the storage-plus-generation category, has the highest withdrawal of all at 48.4%, which makes standalone storage look like the steadier bet inside the renewable pipeline. For the whole-grid context, the US interconnection queue index for June 2026 frames storage against the 1600.7 GW national total.

There is a reason storage and solar sit so close in this table. The two technologies are physical complements: a battery charges on cheap midday solar and discharges into the evening peak, so a region that fills with solar tends to draw storage in behind it. That pairing shows up in the raw counts, with 4,145 solar projects and 2,824 storage projects forming the top two buckets by a wide margin.

What separates them is conviction. Solar's 45.1% withdrawal rate says nearly half of those filings are testing a site; storage's 32.6% says the typical battery applicant is further along. Read together, the two rows describe a renewable pipeline that is led by solar in volume but increasingly anchored by storage in commitment.

Methodology

Source: Public ISO/RTO interconnection-queue listings, via the US Tech Automations grid-queue clock (sealed daily, content-hashed).

All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily grid-queue snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated. Fuel and status labels are grouped from each ISO's own categories, and the grouping rules appear in the display set.

The grid disclaimer holds throughout: a queue position is a request to connect, not a built, approved, or financed project, and a large share withdraw before construction. Read these figures as a pipeline of intent, never as future supply.

The bucketing rules: vendor fuel and technology labels differ by ISO and are grouped into Solar, Battery Storage, Wind, Natural Gas, Hybrid and Other by keyword. Each ISO publishes its own status taxonomy; statuses are grouped into withdrawn, operational (explicitly in-service or commercial operation), still-in-queue, and unknown for feeds that publish no status. Some ISOs drop withdrawn projects from their feed entirely, so a no-withdrawal operator is a feed artifact, not a clean queue.

How the clock builds a storage view:

1. Collect each covered ISO/RTO queue feed on the snapshot day.

2. Normalize every vendor fuel string into the shared buckets so "BESS", "battery", and "storage" land under Battery Storage.

3. Bucket status for each project, then seal the day's aggregate with a content hash so the figures are frozen and reproducible.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does a storage project in the queue mean a battery will be built there?
A: No. A queue position is a request to connect, not a built, approved, or financed project. Storage withdraws less than other renewables — 32.6% are already withdrawn here — but only 4 entries read as operational. The queue measures intent, not delivered capacity.

Q: Why is the storage withdrawal rate lower than solar?
A: Storage withdraws at 32.6% versus 45.1% for solar. Battery projects often enter the queue with a clearer revenue path — price arbitrage or capacity payments — which tends to weed out the most speculative filings before they apply.

Q: Which operator has the most storage?
A: ERCOT, with 922 storage projects, leads every covered operator and runs Battery Storage as its top fuel at a 50.1% share. Texas market design rewards fast-cycling batteries, and the queue concentrates there.

Q: What does the unknown status bucket mean for storage?
A: It means 290 storage projects come from feeds that publish no status at all. They are neither confirmed active nor withdrawn — treat them as unresolved, not as live projects waiting to build.

Q: How would a developer act on this storage data?
A: A developer can read ERCOT's 922-project depth as a crowded but proven market, weigh the 56.9% still-in-queue share as competition, and use the steadier 32.6% withdrawal rate to model how thin an average position is before committing capital to a new request.

Put Grid Data to Work

This storage picture fits three readers. Project developers can use ERCOT's 922-project concentration and the 32.6% withdrawal rate to judge how crowded and how serious a regional storage market is before filing the next request. Equipment suppliers can read 442.0 GW of requested storage as a demand signal and stage cell and inverter inventory toward the operators where storage leads. Energy buyers and utilities can track which active projects survive the churn to line up capacity.

US Tech Automations builds the monitoring layer for that work: watching queue feeds for status changes, routing each change to the right desk, and drafting first-touch outreach when a project moves. The same sealed-snapshot discipline powers the permits research at https://permits.ustechautomations.com.

See how agentic workflows automate queue monitoring

Source: US Tech Automations Research — computed from the sealed daily interconnection-queue snapshot, June 11, 2026.