188.9 GW Waiting in the SPP Interconnection Queue

The Southwest Power Pool carries 188.9 GW of requested capacity across 963 projects in our sealed snapshot of June 11, 2026 — the smallest of the covered queues by both measures. Against a national total of 1600.7 GW across all covered queues, SPP's slice is modest, but it is also one of the most distinctive: it is the only queue here led by wind, which holds a 35.3% share of the mix. That makes SPP the cleanest read on where the wind-rich central plains are putting interconnection requests.

Before the analysis, the necessary caveat. A queue position is a request to connect to the grid, not a built, approved, or financed project. Interconnection queues are aspirational and a large share of projects withdraw before construction.

SPP's feed, however, shows 0 withdrawn projects and a 0.0% withdrawal rate — and that is a feed artifact, not a claim that none withdrew. SPP drops withdrawn projects from its published feed, so the snapshot never sees them. Read 188.9 GW as cumulative developer intent on a feed that omits its own dropouts, not as a pipeline of plants arriving. This is a cross-sectional census of one sealed day.

Two short analytical points frame the rest. First, SPP's wind lead is a geography story: the central plains have the country's best on-shore wind resource, and the queue reflects it. Second, the 0.0% withdrawn figure means SPP's queue cannot be read for attrition the way MISO's or CAISO's can — what you see is the surviving, published set.

What the Snapshot Shows

• SPP holds 188.9 GW of requested capacity across 963 projects, according to the sealed interconnection-queue snapshot.

• Wind leads the SPP mix at a 35.3% share, the only covered queue where wind tops the list.

• The snapshot shows 0 withdrawn SPP projects — a feed artifact, not a claim that none withdrew.

• 673 SPP projects are still in queue, a 69.9% in-queue share, per the sealed snapshot.

• The median SPP project is 173 MW, per the sealed snapshot.

Wind tops the SPP queue at 35.3% — the only covered ISO where wind, not solar or storage, leads the mix.

The SPP Queue at a Glance

The status split here is unusual: alongside 673 in-queue projects, SPP reports 290 operational — projects explicitly in service or commercial operation — which is the only meaningful operational count surfaced among the covered queues. The 173 MW median sits at the larger end of the group, under a top request of 1,400 MW, the familiar wide-base-thin-tail shape.

The Fuel Mix Behind the Queue

SPP's wind lead is the defining feature, but the mix is more balanced than the 35.3% headline suggests. The breakdown below is grouped from the operator's own labels by our keyword buckets.

Wind carries 63,389 MW across 340 SPP projects, the largest bucket and the queue's signature. Read qualitatively, wind's lead tells you developers in the SPP footprint are still building on the region's core resource even as storage and solar catch up — battery storage (192 projects) and solar (182 projects) now sit close behind wind on count. The 95 hybrid requests show the same firming logic seen elsewhere: pairing intermittent wind and solar with storage. SPP is also the rare queue carrying a small but explicit coal presence — 9 projects, 3,115 MW.

Battery storage and solar nearly tie behind wind in SPP — 192 versus 182 projects — signaling a queue diversifying past its wind base.

The conventional and legacy buckets give SPP a more old-fashioned profile than its coastal peers. Natural gas shows 77 projects and 27,988 MW, a dense capacity contribution that fits a region still building dispatchable thermal capacity alongside renewables. Coal is genuinely present — 9 projects and 3,115 MW — which is rare in the covered queues and signals a footprint where legacy generation has not fully exited the connection pipeline. Hydro (6 projects, 37 MW) and nuclear (4 projects, 162 MW) are marginal.

The read for a planner is that SPP's queue blends a wind-resource core with an unusually persistent thermal and even coal tail — a mix that looks different from the storage-and-solar queues of California and Texas, and one worth watching as the region's renewable filings catch up to its wind base.

How SPP Compares

SPP is the quietest covered queue on both project count and requested capacity — smaller than ISO-NE, ERCOT, CAISO, and MISO. The comparison uses each ISO's published headline figures; read position qualitatively rather than as a computed rank.

Across all covered queues the snapshot holds 10,618 projects and 1600.7 GW spanning 5 ISOs and 28 states. A reminder on status comparability: SPP and ERCOT both show 0.0% withdrawn because their feeds drop withdrawn records, while MISO (56.2%) and CAISO (76.8%) publish theirs. Those percentages are not comparable across operators. Within SPP's footprint, Oklahoma is the top state with 306 projects. For the neighboring central footprint, see the MISO interconnection queue report.

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 — SPP is one of them, which is why this snapshot shows 0 withdrawn for SPP.

The grid disclaimer, restated: a queue position is a request to connect, not a built, approved, or financed project. Nothing here is a forecast of capacity that will come online. SPP's 0.0% withdrawn is a feed artifact, not evidence that its projects do not drop out.

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.

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

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why does SPP show 0 withdrawn projects?
A: Because SPP's published feed drops withdrawn projects, so the snapshot never sees them. The 0 and the 0.0% rate are a feed artifact, not a claim that no SPP project withdrew. What remains is the surviving, published set of 963.

Q: Does 188.9 GW mean the central plains are adding that much power?
A: No. The 188.9 GW is requested capacity in the queue, not built capacity, and a position is a request to connect — never a forecast. With withdrawn records omitted, the total reflects only what SPP still publishes.

Q: Why does wind lead the SPP queue?
A: The SPP footprint covers the wind-rich central plains, the country's best on-shore wind resource. Wind tops the mix at 35.3% with 340 projects and 63,389 MW — the only covered queue where wind, not solar or storage, leads.

Q: What does SPP's operational count of 290 mean?
A: Those are projects SPP explicitly marks as in service or commercial operation, the only meaningful operational figure surfaced among the covered queues. Alongside them, 673 projects — 69.9% — remain still in queue.

Q: How would a developer act on this snapshot?
A: By treating the 673 in-queue projects, not the headline 963, as the live competitive set, and by reading the 340 wind versus 192 storage and 182 solar filings to judge where the queue is crowding and where a differentiated proposal might clear.

Put Grid Data to Work

SPP's published queue is a forward demand signal for the central plains, and each audience reads a different slice.

Project developers siting the next request can use the wind-led mix, the 173 MW median, and the 673 active projects to gauge where the queue is concentrated and where a storage or solar filing might stand out against a wind-heavy field.

EPC contractors and equipment suppliers can treat the 63,389 MW of wind, 29,152 MW of storage, and 32,642 MW of solar as an order-book signal for turbines, batteries, and panels across the SPP footprint. Utilities and policy researchers can track the 290 operational projects against the 673 still in queue to read how much of the region's intent has actually energized.

US Tech Automations automates that monitoring: it watches the published feed for new filings and status flips, routes the relevant ones to the right desk, and drafts first-pass outreach when a project matches a buyer's or supplier's criteria. The same sealed-snapshot method runs across every queue — see the national totals in our US interconnection queue index and the technology lens in the wind interconnection queue. Explore the underlying sealed records at permits.ustechautomations.com, and see the monitoring on the agentic workflows platform.

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