More than 50 gigawatts of generation projects have secured the right to connect to PJM Interconnection's grid — and that portfolio, dominated by solar, wind and batteries, is the only capacity that can be "deployed fast enough to do something before 2030," according to Nikhil Kumar, program director at energy analysis nonprofit GridLab. Everything still waiting in the queue, he said, is "speculative, both on the load front and on the generation front."

The stakes are quantified. PJM serves 67 million customers across 13 states and Washington, D.C. Capacity market prices have spiked more than eightfold in recent years, reaching a record $16.4 billion across its past two auctions and driving up utility rates across the region. A May report from Aurora Energy Research, commissioned by RMI, found that adding 5 GW of solar and 5 GW of wind in PJM by 2028 could save ratepayers a combined $10.9 billion over a decade.

Last year, PJM completed interconnection reviews for its first "cluster" of projects — some had waited since 2018. But an interconnection agreement is a right, not a guarantee. According to 2025 data from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 41% of U.S. projects that signed interconnection agreements between 2000 and 2022 eventually withdrew.

The bottlenecks now sit with states and utilities, not the grid operator. "Once PJM has issued interconnection agreements and identified necessary grid upgrades, those projects are done with our process and are free to connect," PJM spokesperson Jeff Shields said. "We would love to see all those projects get built, but we don't have the authority to make it happen."

The utility upgrade problem

Developers must pay for the network upgrades their projects require — costs that are particularly expensive in PJM. Utilities then have to build the local spur lines, substations and deeper transmission investments. In practice, they move slowly.

"Utilities want several years to build simple network upgrades," said David Mindham, senior director of regulatory and market development at EDP Renewables North America. An analysis of PJM construction data from Halcyon, a startup using AI to parse utility datasets, found that interconnection upgrades in PJM are far more likely to run past their scheduled completion dates than other grid projects.

Abraham Silverman, an energy researcher at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored a 2024 report on PJM's interconnection challenges, explained the incentive gap: utilities "don't prioritize network upgrades because they don't get to roll them into rates." PJM-region utilities have concentrated grid spending on projects with lighter regulatory oversight — such as upgrading existing lines — to maximize regulated returns on capital. Faced with scarce grid equipment, they prioritize profit-bearing projects over developer-funded ones.

A 2025 analysis from RMI and the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators proposed fixes: requiring utilities to share data on network-upgrade timelines and holding regulatory hearings to justify lags. Kumar wants teeth behind the deadlines. "There should be penalties, or some strict deadlines, on meeting certain milestones. Simply requesting it is not going to work," he said. "State governors need to force their utilities to help get more generation online. There's no two ways about it."

Permitting and financing

States also control environmental reviews, siting, zoning and land-use approvals. Local opposition to solar and wind is rising in the rural areas where those projects tend to be built, and state efforts to push projects through risk drawn-out legal challenges. Illinois and Virginia have started advancing pro-clean-energy permitting policies, but progress is slow. Ohio is moving in the opposite direction, making permitting harder.

"States have made a lot of noise about improving state and local permitting, but we are still waiting to see the output," said John Miller, managing director and energy transition policy analyst at investment bank TD Cowen.

The yearslong queue waits already did damage. Developers Silverman interviewed for his 2024 report had "effectively suspended all permitting and siting work and all equipment procurement work because they simply didn't know when it was going to come out of the queue," he said. Then came the pandemic, inflation, and radically changed project economics.

The data center lever

Data centers are the demand engine behind PJM's capacity crunch — and potentially the financing tool for the queued-out clean energy fleet. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have financed solar and wind projects for more than a decade, and wind, solar and storage remain the cheapest new-build generation in the U.S.

"If the new hyperscalers can sign contracts for new generation, a lot of the pieces will fall into place," said Glen Thomas, president of the PJM Power Providers Group, a trade organization for major power developers.

States are starting to force the issue. Illinois lawmakers are debating a "bring your own new clean energy" requirement for data centers. Pennsylvania's new data center plan sets relatively low carbon-free energy requirements. New Jersey is encouraging data centers to fund home efficiency, batteries and rooftop solar.

A July proposal from PJM would put utilities and state regulators in charge of requiring new data centers to pay for their own capacity or face cutoffs during grid emergencies. That proposal sets a 2032 deadline for securing resources — and projects without interconnection agreements by now or early next year will struggle to be online by then, said Julia Hoos, head of USA East at Aurora Energy Research.

Batteries versus gas

PJM has just under 5 GW of gas-fired plants that could realistically make that window, Hoos said — and roughly an equivalent amount of batteries ready to deploy. Solar and wind count little toward capacity obligations given intermittency, but four-hour batteries are cost-competitive with efficient combined-cycle gas plants and cheaper than combustion turbines, per Aurora Energy Research.

Gas plants currently earn more in PJM's capacity market because they run around the clock, noted Tom Rutigliano, senior advocate for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. But batteries hold a decisive speed advantage: gas turbine manufacturing backlogs and competition for engineering and construction firms have pushed gas plant completion timelines to five to seven years.

"We hear you can build storage about two years faster than gas," Rutigliano said — and with data center demand at a fever pitch, "being available two years earlier makes a big difference." Unlike California and Texas, which have built tens of gigawatts of grid batteries, PJM has barely built any. New Jersey and Illinois are already deploying storage mandates to goose the market.

The near-term milestone to watch: whether governors impose enforceable deadlines and penalties on utility network upgrades, and whether hyperscalers sign offtake contracts with the 50-plus GW of cleared projects. "We have to ask the question: Are they serious about their climate commitments?" Silverman said. "I'd like to think they are — but we need to see some results."