492.2 GW Waiting in the CAISO Interconnection Queue

California's grid operator carries the single largest pile of requested capacity in our snapshot: 492.2 GW sits in the CAISO interconnection queue as of June 11, 2026, across 2,278 projects. Against a national total of 1600.7 GW across all covered queues, CAISO alone accounts for a striking share of the megawatts developers have asked to connect. But a queue position is a request to connect, not a built, approved, or financed project — and CAISO is the clearest case in this dataset of why that distinction matters.

Of those 2,278 projects, 1,750 are already withdrawn. That is a 76.8% withdrawal rate: more than three of every four projects that ever entered this snapshot's CAISO list have left it. So 492.2 GW is not a forecast of generation arriving in California. It is a measure of how much developer interest the grid has attracted, most of which the interconnection process has already filtered out. This is a cross-sectional census of one sealed day, not a trend.

CAISO Against Its Peers

Because the story here is scale, start with the comparison. The table below places CAISO's published headline figures next to the other covered ISOs. Read position qualitatively: CAISO leads on requested capacity, MISO leads on raw project count, and ERCOT sits close behind CAISO on megawatts.

The hierarchy is informative. CAISO's 492.2 GW is the most requested capacity of any single queue here, yet it does so with fewer projects than MISO — meaning CAISO's filings skew toward larger requests on a capacity basis even as its 128 MW median is the smallest in the group. The national snapshot covers 5 ISOs across 28 states, holding 10,618 projects and 1600.7 GW combined. Within CAISO's footprint, California is the top state with 2,076 projects — broken out in the California interconnection queue report.

CAISO carries the most requested capacity of any queue in the snapshot — 492.2 GW — but also the highest withdrawal rate, at 76.8%.

An interconnection queue is the ordered list of generation and storage projects that have applied to connect to a regional grid and are working through study. CAISO's version is large, capacity-dense, and heavily attritional.

What the Snapshot Shows

• CAISO holds 492.2 GW of requested capacity across 2,278 projects, according to the sealed interconnection-queue snapshot.

• 1,750 of those projects are withdrawn — a 76.8% withdrawal rate, the highest in the snapshot.

• Only 528 CAISO projects remain active, a 23.2% in-queue share.

• The single largest request is ATLAS COMPLEX at 3,200 MW, per the sealed snapshot.

• Solar leads the CAISO mix at a 46.1% share, per the sealed snapshot.

That 76.8% is the figure to carry away. When three-quarters of a queue has withdrawn, the published capacity total is best understood as cumulative developer ambition rather than a build pipeline. The 23.2% still active — 528 projects — is the slice that has survived the early filtering.

The CAISO Queue at a Glance

The 128 MW median against a 3,200 MW top request says CAISO's queue, like its peers, is a wide base of mid-sized projects under a thin tail of very large ones. ATLAS COMPLEX, the largest at 3,200 MW, is also the largest single request anywhere in the snapshot.

The Fuel Mix Behind the Queue

CAISO's queue is solar-first, with a very heavy storage presence right behind it. The breakdown below is grouped from the operator's own labels by our keyword buckets.

Battery storage carries 169,982 MW across 689 CAISO requests, nearly matching solar's capacity despite fewer projects. That near-parity is the distinctive feature of California's queue. In most footprints solar dominates capacity; in CAISO, storage is running close behind, reflecting a market where developers are betting heavily on firming and shifting solar output to evening peaks.

Wind shows 100,877 MW across just 405 CAISO projects — a high capacity-per-project profile that points to large offshore and remote on-shore proposals.

The smaller buckets fill out the read. Natural gas carries 42,187 MW across 113 projects — fewer requests but individually substantial thermal plants, a reminder that even a renewables-leading market keeps filing dispatchable capacity for reliability. Hydro is minor at 13 projects and 4,985 MW, and the Other bucket is negligible at 7 projects and 249 MW.

The shape of the whole queue, then, is a renewables-and-storage core with a thin conventional spine. For anyone treating the CAISO queue as a demand map, the message is that California's connection activity is overwhelmingly solar plus storage, with wind concentrating its megawatts into a handful of large filings and gas playing the dense, infrequent backstop role.

A second analytical point ties the fuel mix back to the withdrawal story. Storage-and-solar queues attract speculative early filings because the projects are modular and the siting bar is lower than for thermal plants — which is part of why CAISO's withdrawal rate runs so high. Easy to file, easy to abandon when interconnection study costs land.

The 76.8% withdrawn is not a sign that California stopped wanting clean power; it is a sign that the queue is doing exactly what an early-stage funnel does, admitting many low-commitment requests and shedding most of them before construction. The 528 survivors are the part of the 492.2 GW worth tracking as real intent.

Methodology and the Grid Disclaimer

This report draws on public ISO/RTO interconnection-queue listings, via the grid-queue clock (sealed daily, content-hashed). The scope: 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. This is a census of the published queues, not of every project on every grid in the country.

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. 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, still-in-queue, and unknown for feeds that publish no status. Some ISOs drop withdrawn projects from their feed entirely.

The grid disclaimer again: a queue position is a request to connect, not a built, approved, or financed project. CAISO's 76.8% withdrawal rate is the strongest in-snapshot evidence that queued capacity is aspirational. None of the 492.2 GW should be read as generation that will come online.

How we build the snapshot:

1. Collect. We pull each covered ISO's published interconnection-queue feed on its own schedule.

2. Normalize. Differing vendor fuel and status labels are mapped onto common buckets.

3. Seal. The day's normalized records are content-hashed and stored append-only, so the snapshot is reproducible.

4. Aggregate. We compute counts, capacity totals, medians, and status splits across the sealed records.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why is the CAISO withdrawal rate so high?
A: At 76.8%, more than three of four CAISO projects in the snapshot are withdrawn. Developers file early, often before securing land, financing, or offtake; as study and upgrade costs land, many drop out. The high rate reflects aggressive filtering, not a data error.

Q: Does 492.2 GW mean California is adding that much power?
A: No. The 492.2 GW is requested capacity in the queue, not built capacity. With 76.8% withdrawn, only 528 projects remain active. A queue position is a request to connect, never a forecast of generation that will energize.

Q: How is a sealed snapshot different from re-querying the CAISO feed today?
A: A sealed snapshot is the feed as it stood on June 11, 2026, content-hashed and stored append-only so it is reproducible. Re-querying the live feed returns a moving target; the snapshot is a fixed, citable record of that one day.

Q: Why is battery storage so prominent in CAISO?
A: Storage carries 169,982 MW across 689 requests, nearly matching solar. California developers pair storage with solar to shift midday output to evening peaks, so the queue reflects heavy investment in firming intermittent generation.

Q: How does CAISO compare to MISO?
A: CAISO leads on requested capacity at 492.2 GW versus MISO's 299.6 GW, but MISO has more projects (3,786 versus 2,278). CAISO's filings are larger on a capacity basis even with a smaller 128 MW median.

Put Grid Data to Work

CAISO's queue is a rich early-demand signal, and different readers act on different parts of it.

Energy buyers seeking PPAs can use the 528 still-active projects — not the headline 2,278 — to build a realistic shortlist, screening out the 76.8% that have already withdrawn. EPC contractors and equipment suppliers can read the 689 battery-storage and 1,051 solar requests as a forward demand picture for panels, inverters, and storage hardware in the California market. Utilities and policy researchers can track CAISO's 76.8% withdrawal rate as a benchmark for how speculative large queues become.

US Tech Automations automates that monitoring: it watches the published feeds for new filings and status flips, routes the relevant ones to the right desk, and drafts initial outreach when a project crosses a developer's criteria. The same sealed-snapshot method runs across every queue — compare the national totals in our US interconnection queue index and the storage lens in the battery storage interconnection queue. Browse the underlying sealed records at permits.ustechautomations.com, and see the monitoring in action on the agentic workflows platform.

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