What Is Queued to Connect in Illinois?

What is queued to connect in Illinois? On June 11, 2026, the sealed answer was 482 projects carrying 50.6 GW of proposed capacity — a mid-sized state queue with a healthy clean-energy lean. The number to hold alongside it: 44.8% of those projects already carry a withdrawn status.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 record developer intent, and many entries drop out before construction. This report is a cross-sectional snapshot of one sealed day — no trends, no forecasts about what Illinois will actually build.

Illinois holds 482 queued projects worth 50.6 GW, and 44.8% already carry a withdrawn status.

Sizing Illinois Against Its Peers

Lead with the comparison, because Illinois is best understood in the company of similar states. The table sets it beside the other queues sealed on the same day. Capacity is proposed nameplate, not delivered power.

Illinois sits in the same weight class as Michigan — 482 projects to 502, with comparable withdrawn shares of 44.8% and 47.4%. Both run through the same regional grid operator and both are solar-led, making them natural mirrors. Against the Texas and California giants, Illinois is an order of magnitude smaller on filings, but its withdrawn share is a credible, mid-range figure rather than one of the feed-driven extremes (Texas's 3.3%, Massachusetts's 0.0%). Set against the national queue of 10,618 projects in the US interconnection queue index, Illinois is a small but honest slice.

An interconnection queue is the ordered list of projects asking a grid operator for capacity and permission to connect. Filing is cheap relative to building, so queues run long and attrition runs high.

The Illinois-Michigan parallel is the most instructive comparison in the table, precisely because the two states are so alike. Both run through MISO, both lead with solar, both sit in the mid-400s to low-500s on project count, and both report withdrawn rates in the mid-40s.

When two states this similar produce nearly identical numbers, it suggests the figures are capturing something real about MISO's interconnection process rather than quirks of any single state's filers. The contrast with Texas and Massachusetts — whose near-zero withdrawn rates come from feed conventions, not reality — only sharpens the point: Illinois and Michigan are the honest mid-range, and they agree with each other.

For a developer or analyst, that consistency is itself useful. A 44.8% withdrawn rate is not an anomaly to explain away; it is roughly what a serious MISO filing should expect to face. Plan around it.

The Illinois Queue at a Glance

Now the state slice in detail. Illinois's queue runs through MISO, the regional grid operator, though a state's projects can span more than one ISO.

The withdrawn count is 216 of 482, a 44.8% rate, leaving 266 still in queue. Because Illinois sits in MISO — which publishes a real withdrawn field, detailed in the MISO interconnection queue report — this figure reflects genuine attrition, not a feed quirk. The median project is 160 MW, and the largest filing is the Austin Substation 345kV Bus at 1,165 MW, a transmission-bus interconnection point.

216 of Illinois's 482 queued projects are withdrawn, leaving 266 still in queue.

The 44.8% withdrawn rate is the lens for everything else: nearly half of what is filed in Illinois is already gone. The 266 still-in-queue figure is the live read.

It is worth being explicit about what that 266 does and does not mean. It is not a promise that 266 projects will be built — a queue position is a request to connect, not a built or financed project, and more will withdraw before any break ground.

What the 266 does represent is the set of Illinois filings that have survived the queue's first and harshest filter. Against the gross 482, it is the figure that comes closest to describing live developer intent in the state, and it is the number an analyst should reach for rather than the headline count. Treat 482 as the gross funnel and 266 as the working pipeline.

The Fuel Mix

Sorted by technology, Illinois reads as a solar-and-wind queue with a strong hybrid presence. Fuel labels are our keyword bucketing of differing vendor categories.

Solar leads with 214 projects, a 44.4% share, and 19,943 MW. What sets Illinois apart from its peers is the depth of wind and hybrid: 102 wind projects (13,281 MW) and 55 hybrid filings (8,000 MW), the largest hybrid slice among these five states. Battery Storage adds 109 projects. Natural gas is almost absent — a single 1,165 MW filing, which happens to be the queue's largest project. The mix is a near-pure renewables-and-storage queue.

The hybrid depth is the genuinely distinctive feature. Hybrid filings — solar or wind paired with on-site storage in one interconnection request — are a sign of a maturing market, because they reflect developers designing around the duck curve from the outset rather than bolting storage on later. At 55 projects and 8,000 MW, Illinois carries more hybrid capacity than any other state in this edition. Read alongside the 109 standalone batteries, the storage commitment embedded in the Illinois queue is larger than the battery row alone suggests.

Wind's role is the other contrast with the western states. California and Texas queues are tilting toward solar-plus-storage; Illinois still files heavily for wind, with 102 projects and 13,281 MW. That reflects the strong Midwestern wind resource and the long history of wind development across the MISO footprint. The single natural-gas filing — also the queue's largest project at 1,165 MW — is the lone dispatchable entry, which makes Illinois one of the most renewables-concentrated queues in the edition by share of filings.

As always, the fuel mix describes intent, not delivery. With 44.8% of the queue already withdrawn, roughly half of every row above represents projects that have exited. The distribution is a clean read of what Illinois developers proposed; the status field is the check on how much of it remains live.

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.

Vendor fuel and technology labels differ by ISO and are grouped into Solar, Battery Storage, Wind, Hybrid, Natural Gas and Nuclear by keyword. Status taxonomies differ; we group them into withdrawn, operational, still-in-queue, and unknown for feeds that publish no status. Illinois runs through MISO, which publishes a real withdrawn field — so its 44.8% rate reflects actual attrition rather than a feed artifact. Some ISOs elsewhere drop withdrawn projects entirely, which is why 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 each ISO feed. Across this edition, 5 ISOs spanning 28 states.

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

3. Bucket status and fuel. Sort every project into the standard categories.

4. Seal the snapshot. Hash the normalized day and append it to the immutable ledger.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does being in the Illinois queue mean a project gets built?
A: No. A queue position is a request to connect, not a built or financed project. Of 482 Illinois filings, 216 (44.8%) are already withdrawn and 266 remain in queue.

Q: Is the 44.8% Illinois withdrawal rate reliable?
A: Yes, relatively. Illinois runs through MISO, which publishes a real withdrawn field, so the 216 withdrawn reflects actual attrition rather than a feed convention.

Q: How does Illinois compare to Michigan?
A: Very closely. Illinois has 482 projects and 44.8% withdrawn; Michigan has 502 and 47.4%. Both are MISO-served, solar-led, mid-sized queues.

Q: What technology dominates the Illinois queue?
A: Solar, at 214 projects and a 44.4% share. Illinois also stands out for its 102 wind and 55 hybrid filings — the deepest hybrid slice of these five states.

Q: Are these Illinois figures reproducible?
A: Yes. The June 11, 2026 snapshot is content-hashed and sealed, so the 482-project count and 44.8% withdrawn share are fixed and auditable.

Put Grid Data to Work

The Illinois queue informs several teams. Solar and wind developers can read the 214 solar and 102 wind filings to judge how crowded each segment is before committing study costs. Hybrid project teams should note the unusually deep 55-project, 8,000 MW hybrid slice — a sign Illinois is a friendly market for paired generation-plus-storage. Utility and policy analysts should work from the 266 still-in-queue count rather than the gross 482, given that 44.8% have already withdrawn.

US Tech Automations automates this kind of queue monitoring: watching the 482 filings for status flips, alerting when a project withdraws, and routing the survivors to the right desk. Teams can wire that in through our agentic workflows platform, with the sealed snapshots living at https://permits.ustechautomations.com.

For the technology-level view of where Illinois's 109 battery filings sit nationally, see the battery storage interconnection queue.

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