What Is Queued to Connect in California?

So what is actually queued to connect in California? On June 11, 2026, the answer was 2,076 projects carrying 416.8 GW of proposed generation and storage capacity — the largest single-state pile in our snapshot. But that headline hides the more honest number: 77.5% of those projects already carry a withdrawn status.

A queue position is a request to connect to the grid, not a built, approved, or financed project. Interconnection queues are aspirational lists, and a large share of entries drop out before anyone pours concrete. California is the clearest example in this edition. Of its 2,076 projects, 1,609 are withdrawn and only 467 remain in queue. Read the queue as a record of developer intent, not as a forecast of what the lights will run on.

This report is a cross-sectional snapshot — one sealed day, no trends. We do not claim any of this capacity is coming online.

California carries 2,076 queued projects and 416.8 GW, the biggest state slice in the snapshot.

How California Stacks Up Against Other States

Because California leads on volume, the cleanest way into the data is the comparison. The table below places California next to the other large state queues sealed on the same day. Capacity is the proposed nameplate figure each developer filed; it is not delivered power.

California and Texas sit in a class of their own on project count, with California at 2,076 and Texas at 2,029. Everything below them — Massachusetts at 605, Michigan at 502, Illinois at 482 — represents a steep drop. California is busier than every peer in this table on raw filings, yet its withdrawn share is far higher than the others report, which is the whole story.

An interconnection queue is the ordered list of power projects that have asked a grid operator for permission and capacity to connect. Filing is cheap relative to building; that asymmetry is why queues swell. The same pattern shows up across every grid operator we track — the national view sits in the US interconnection queue index, where California's pile is one of the largest contributors.

One more framing note before the detail. Capacity figures throughout this report are nameplate values each developer wrote on a filing — the theoretical maximum output of a plant that may never be built. We never sum or annualize them into delivered energy. The honest way to read a 416.8 GW total is as the gross ambition on file in California on a single day, with the 77.5% withdrawn share standing as the standing caveat against treating any of it as a delivery forecast.

Inside the California Queue

Most of California's queue runs through CAISO, the state's grid operator, though the assignment notes a state's projects can span more than one ISO. Here is the at-a-glance picture for the state slice.

The median California project is 110 MW — utility-scale, not rooftop. A median that size against a 416.8 GW total tells you the queue is built from hundreds of large, similar-sized plants rather than a handful of giants. The single largest entry, GEMINI WIND NORTH at 2,006 MW, is an outlier well above the median.

California's median queued project is 110 MW, and its largest is GEMINI WIND NORTH at 2,006 MW.

The 77.5% withdrawn share is real and high. It is the evidence behind the disclaimer: most projects that enter this queue never reach commercial operation. For California, that figure aligns with CAISO's own statewide withdrawn rate of 76.8% in our snapshot, detailed in the CAISO interconnection queue report.

It is worth dwelling on what 1,609 withdrawn projects represents. Each was once a serious enough proposal to pay study deposits and hold a position in line. The fact that more than three in four eventually exited tells you the California queue functions as a wide funnel: developers file early and speculatively to lock a spot, then shed projects as interconnection costs, financing, and offtake realities firm up. For anyone reading the 2,076 headline as a pipeline, the 467 still-in-queue count is the figure that actually describes live intent.

The Fuel Mix

Group the California queue by technology and the state's energy strategy comes into focus. Fuel labels are our keyword bucketing of differing vendor categories; the rules are in the methodology below.

Solar leads on project count at 942 and a 45.4% share, but Battery Storage tells the more interesting story: 649 projects carrying 149,991 MW — more proposed megawatts than solar's 140,018 MW from fewer projects. That means the typical battery filing is larger than the typical solar filing. A queue this storage-heavy signals developers expecting to firm up an already solar-rich grid, shifting midday sun into evening demand.

Wind sits third at 359 projects and 83,099 MW, and natural gas is a thin slice at 106 projects. The distribution reads as a clean-energy queue with storage as its center of gravity, not a fossil expansion.

Two smaller buckets round out the picture: hydro at 13 projects and 4,985 MW, and an "Other" catch-all of just 7 projects and 249 MW. The near-absence of new gas and the thinness of the Other bucket reinforce the read — California's filers are overwhelmingly proposing solar generation and the batteries to time-shift it. That said, the keyword bucketing behind these labels is a judgment call we make consistently across every ISO; the rules are spelled out in the methodology so the numbers stay reproducible rather than editorial.

Methodology

Source: Public ISO/RTO interconnection-queue listings, via the US Tech Automations grid-queue clock (sealed daily, content-hashed). The scope is 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 — so a low withdrawn figure can be a feed artifact, not a claim that nothing withdrew.

Reminder on the disclaimer: a queue position is a request to connect, not a built, approved, or financed project. We make no forecast that any queued capacity will be delivered.

How the clock seals each snapshot:

1. Collect. Pull each covered ISO feed — across this edition, 5 ISOs spanning 28 states.

2. Normalize. Map each vendor's fuel and status labels onto our shared buckets.

3. Seal. Hash the day's normalized data and append it to the immutable ledger.

4. Aggregate. Compute the state and fuel cuts you see above from the sealed file.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does being in California's queue mean a project will get built?
A: No. 1,609 of California's 2,076 queued projects — 77.5% — already carry a withdrawn status in this snapshot. A queue position is a request to connect, not a built or financed project.

Q: Why is California's withdrawal rate so high?
A: At 77.5%, California's withdrawn share leads the state table, closely tracking CAISO's 76.8% statewide rate. High filing volumes plus costly interconnection studies push many speculative projects out before construction.

Q: How is a sealed snapshot different from checking the queue today?
A: Our June 11, 2026 file is content-hashed and frozen, so the 2,076-project figure is reproducible. A live re-query would return a different, unverifiable number with no audit trail.

Q: What does the 110 MW median tell me about the market?
A: A 110 MW median across 416.8 GW means the queue is built from many utility-scale plants of similar size, not a few giants. The largest, GEMINI WIND NORTH, is 2,006 MW.

Q: Who actually files these California interconnection requests?
A: Independent power producers, storage developers, and utilities. With 649 battery projects in the mix, storage developers are a major share of California filers.

Put Grid Data to Work

The California queue is a working signal for several audiences. Project developers siting the next request can read the 77.5% withdrawn share and the 110 MW median to gauge how crowded and competitive a given pocket of the grid already is before committing study deposits. EPC contractors and equipment suppliers can watch the 649-project battery slice — that is where near-term procurement demand for storage gear concentrates. Utilities and policy researchers can use the 467 still-in-queue count as a cleaner read on live intent than the gross 2,076.

All three audiences face the same problem: the queue moves daily, and the changes that matter — a status flip, a new filing, a quiet withdrawal — are buried in bulk feed exports. A sealed snapshot is the strategic view; catching the daily deltas is the operational one. US Tech Automations automates that monitoring: watching feed changes, routing status flips to the right desk, and drafting outreach when a tracked project moves. Teams reading these state cuts daily can build that into their ops stack via our agentic workflows platform, and the underlying snapshots live at https://permits.ustechautomations.com.

Because California's queue is so storage-heavy, the national battery storage interconnection queue is the natural companion read for anyone focused on the 649-project storage slice above.

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