140 gigawatts waiting for money

Before a power plant can sell electricity it must connect to the grid, and before it connects it must sign an interconnection agreement with the grid's operator. Texas's operator, ERCOT, and New York's, NYISO, publish every project in their queue: who is behind it, how large it is, what stage it has reached and when it expects to run.^1,2

We counted the projects that have reached a signed agreement and have not yet started construction. In the two grids together there are 629 of them, totalling 140.6 gigawatts. The median project is 200 megawatts.

Texas dominates: about 135 of the 140 gigawatts. Solar is the largest group at 62.1 GW, followed by batteries and other technologies at 35.4 GW, wind at 20.3 GW and gas at 17.3 GW. Getting to this stage is itself slow. In the projects where we can measure it, the median time from entering the queue to signing the agreement was 45.7 months.

The dates the developers give are the striking part. Of the 140 gigawatts, 34.6 say they will be running in 2027 and 56.5 in 2028.

These dates slip, as anyone who has worked on a power project knows. But a project cannot be built without money, and almost none of these is yet financed. At the rough costs per megawatt we use for each technology, the projects waiting in Texas and New York need something over $150bn of capital in the next three years. That figure is an estimate, and it is only two of the seven US grid operators.

Most of that money will come as construction loans, tax equity and long-term project debt, raised by developers who have done it before. Some will not. A developer with one 200 MW project, an agreement in hand and a date two years away is a company that needs about $200m and has rarely raised it. The queue says who they are.

Cite as: “140 gigawatts waiting for money”, Norvian Review, 5 November 2026.