The one hard number: 12.2 GW out of CAISO

The withdrawals break down as 9,697 MW of gas across 19 projects, 1,900 MW of solar across three, and 650 MW of wind across two. All but one sit in California. The outlier is a 634 MW gas plant in Clark County, Nevada.

Before reading this as 12 GW of live projects collapsing in a week, look at the queue IDs. They run low, from the 250s into the 450s, and several of the names belong to plants that are already operating or were shelved years ago: Marsh Landing, La Paloma, Antioch, Oakley. This reads as CAISO clearing aged, stale positions, not two dozen developers pulling the plug on the same Tuesday. Treat it as housekeeping until the queue-reform status confirms otherwise.

Housekeeping or not, the composition says something. What washed out was overwhelmingly gas, in the ISO where gas has had the hardest time advancing in the first place. California’s queue is where thermal proposals sit and then vanish. This week a batch of them vanished at once.

Nuclear: motion, not megawatts

By item count, most of the digest is NRC activity. Topical reports, withholding determinations, decommissioning filings, security rulemakings, SMR pre-licensing. The pipeline flagged nearly all of it as routine, and that’s the right call. It’s licensing throat-clearing, years away from any electron.

A few items carry more weight. Constellation filed a subsequent license renewal for R.E. Ginna in upstate New York, which is about keeping existing baseload alive rather than adding to it. The NRC opened environmental scoping for two SMR units at Palisades in Michigan, a real if early step. And the single item that touches our beat directly is buried in the stack: the comment period for Constellation’s license amendment at the Crane Clean Energy Center, docket 05000289, with comments due July 8. Crane is the former Three Mile Island Unit 1, the 835 MW restart tied to Microsoft’s data-center power deal, targeted for 2027. The digest doesn’t flag that connection, but it’s the one operating-nuclear-meets-data-center story on the board, and this week it surfaced as a routine comment window. Motion, not megawatts.

DOE reopens the loan window

DOE’s Loan Programs Office is active again. The digest reports its first clean-energy loan guarantee in nearly a decade, a first conditional commitment for advanced fossil energy, a $2B tribal energy solicitation, and a grid-reliability loan closing. Read this cluster with caution. Some items carry stale framing (one still references the “Biden-Harris Administration,” another is the 2024 Ultium battery guarantee), so at least part of the batch looks recycled rather than fresh. The signal that survives: federal financing for firm and grid capacity is flowing again. That’s money, and money sits a long way upstream of a built megawatt.

Reading the signal

One theme runs through the week. It’s all supply side, and it splits cleanly into subtraction and paper. Gas left the CAISO queue in bulk. Nuclear advanced on paper. DOE reopened the checkbook. None of it puts firm capacity on the system in the near term.

Note what’s absent. The large-load demand side, the ERCOT Large Load Working Group we treat as the primary read on data-center demand, surfaced nothing this week, so there’s no fresh demand print to set this supply activity against. What’s left is lopsided: the queue is shedding thermal capacity, the firm-power hope is migrating to SMRs that are years of licensing away, and the one restart tied to a real data-center offtake showed up as a comment deadline. The gap between the load-growth story and deliverable firm megawatts did not close this week.

The one to watch: whether the CAISO withdrawals are a queue-reform purge. If CAISO confirms a batch cleanup of aged positions, the 12 GW is administrative and the real story is how much dead gas was still nominally in the queue. If any of these are genuine live-project cancellations, that’s a harder read on building thermal capacity in California, and worth pulling the individual queue records.

Dynawatt is an independent brief compiled from public sources (ISO/RTO interconnection queues, FERC notices, ERCOT Large Load Working Group, PJM stakeholder committees, NRC ADAMS, and DOE Loan Programs Office announcements). It is informational, non-advocacy, and not investment advice.

Large load & data centers

PJM moves toward “Connect and Manage” for large loads

PJM’s Board has directed a framework that would let large loads, data centers chief among them, connect to the transmission system before the upgrades that normally support them are finished. The trade is explicit. A load that does not bring its own new generation (PJM’s “Bring Your Own New Generation,” or BYONG, test) accepts non-firm status and agrees to be curtailed during system stress, ahead of pre-emergency demand response. It began as an Exelon problem statement at the Markets and Reliability Committee in February. It’s now a Board-directed workstream under a new Senior Task Force, with tariff and operational language targeted for the back half of 2026.

The moving parts worth tracking:

• Loads connecting under the framework would sit outside the capacity market’s Base Residual Auction. That’s PJM’s mechanism for keeping the cost off everyone else.

• A proposed Large Load Registry (50 MW and up per delivery point) would give states and utilities real-time visibility into where demand is landing, shifting enforcement toward state retail regulators instead of PJM mandates.

• A separate EDC and data-center coalition proposal floats a subscription-style backstop procurement, with a price cap near $555/MW-day and a 500 MW locational limit, deferring existing tariff backstops to the 2030/31 delivery year.

• The Data Center Coalition is pushing a state opt-in version: interruptible service classes, plus manual load-shed that curtails large commercial and industrial before residential.

The through-line is that nobody disputes the loads are coming. The fight is over who gets curtailed first, who pays, and whether the state or the RTO holds the lever.

ISO: PJM · Type: large-load · Stage: rule-change · Parties: Exelon, Data Center Coalition

Why PJM is in a hurry

PJM’s February long-term forecast raised the 20-year summer growth rate from 2.0% to 2.4%, with an explicit data-center adjustment across 13 member utilities and roughly 18.6 GW of net increase penciled in by 2040. Near-term numbers actually came down. The back half of the curve jumped. Meanwhile the 2027/2028 capacity auction cleared about 6.5 GW short of the reserve-margin target, driven by new large-load submissions with no matching supply. That gap is the entire reason Connect and Manage exists.

ISO: PJM · Type: large-load · Stage: study · Capacity: 18.6 GW

Nuclear & firm power

Clinch River clears its safety review

The NRC issued the Final Safety Evaluation Report for TVA’s Clinch River Unit 1 construction permit (Docket 50-615) in June. For the GE Hitachi BWRX-300, this is the gate that matters. The FSER means the agency has finished its technical review, and it lands alongside an ACRS safety report and a Revision 1 PSAR filing. Clinch River is the closest thing the US has to a flagship SMR, and it just moved materially closer to a construction authorization.

Type: nuclear · Stage: cod · State: TN · Parties: TVA, GE Hitachi

Palisades, twice over

Two different things are happening at the Palisades site in Michigan, and they’re easy to confuse. The existing 800 MW reactor (Entergy) is being restarted with DOE backing. The Energy Dominance Financing program approved its fourth, fifth, and sixth loan disbursements this period, a steady drip that reads as federal commitment to getting baseload back online. Separately, Holtec’s Palisades SMR LLC has filed a phased construction permit for two SMR-300 units (Pioneer 1 and 2), and the NRC has opened EIS scoping plus Section 106 cultural consultations with more than a dozen tribes. The consultation volume is procedural. Read it as the EIS clock starting, not as a dozen separate milestones.

Type: nuclear · Stage: study + cod · Capacity: 800 MW + 2×300 MW · State: MI · Parties: Entergy, Holtec

The advanced-reactor pipeline keeps filling

Oklo got preliminary NRC feedback on moving Aurora from DOE authorization to full NRC licensing, completed a pre-Phase 2 audit on its combined license application, and filed approved principal design criteria. X-energy cleared a graphite core verification for the Xe-100. None of these are construction events. They’re the licensing queue stacking up, which is the leading indicator for the firm power data-center developers actually want.

Type: nuclear · Stage: study · Parties: Oklo, X-energy

DOE keeps writing checks

Beyond Palisades, the Loan Programs Office closed a guarantee to restart a Pennsylvania reactor, backed a nuclear supply-chain financing portfolio, and reaffirmed support for the Vogtle expansion (~2.2 GW) through conditional commitment and financial close. The NRC also filed its May status report under Executive Order 14156, the national energy emergency declaration that sits over most of this activity.

Type: nuclear · Stage: cod + rule-change · Parties: DOE LPO, Southern Company

Storage & interconnection

CAISO logged three grid-scale batteries. Plano Storage (350 MW, Monterey County) reached commercial operation. Bateria del Sur (350 MW, Imperial County) and Dallas Energy Storage (400 MW, Monterey County) entered the queue. Storage stays the steadiest line in CAISO’s pipeline, the fast-response capacity the grid leans on while firmer resources grind through longer queues.

ISO: CAISO · Type: storage · State: CA

The week in one line. Demand is now the thing the system plans around. PJM is drafting rules to curtail it, the NRC is licensing the reactors meant to feed it, and DOE is financing the restarts in between.

Dynawatt is an independent brief compiled from public sources: ISO/RTO interconnection queues, FERC notices (Federal Register), the ERCOT Large Load Working Group, PJM stakeholder committees, NRC ADAMS, and DOE Loan Programs Office announcements. Informational, non-advocacy, not investment advice.

The queue in one breakdown

The composition is lopsided in a way that matters. Solar-plus-storage hybrids account for 17,996 MW, 52% of the queue across 67 projects. Standalone batteries add another 14,349 MW, 42% across 61 projects. Put those together and storage paired with solar is 94% of every megawatt seeking grid access in California right now. Firm dispatchable generation, the kind that produces power at 3am regardless of sun or wind, comes to 1,236 MW, just 3.6%, across four projects: three gas plants, the largest a 590 MW combined-cycle unit, and a single 53 MW geothermal facility. Wind is the remainder, under 3%.

Reading the signal

Most of this queue is not capacity. It is timing. A battery generates nothing. It moves existing power from one hour to another. The 18 GW of solar-plus-storage and 14 GW of standalone batteries piling into this queue are built for a single job: smoothing California’s midday solar glut into the evening ramp. They firm a renewable grid, and they do it well. They add close to nothing that a flat, constant load can draw on after dark.

The firm power that exists is tiny, and all of it sits years away. Filter the queue to its most material projects and the firm names do rise into view: a 715 MW gas combined-cycle plant, a 501 MW combustion turbine, a 500 MW steam-and-storage hybrid. But every one of them is at queue entry, the very start of a CAISO interconnection process that routinely runs several years. The projects actually crossing into operation this cycle are batteries and solar. So the supply reaching the grid now is intermittent, and the firm supply is still a filing.

For a data-center load, that is the wrong build on the wrong clock. AI demand is flat and round-the-clock, the opposite of the duck-curve problem storage solves, and it is landing in the next 18 to 24 months, faster than a gas plant clears interconnection. California is pouring 34.6 GW into its queue, and the sliver that actually matches the shape of the incoming demand is the part furthest from delivering a watt. The queue is not failing to grow. It is growing in the wrong direction for this particular load.

What’s not in the data

A limit worth stating outright, because the framing depends on it. All 139 of these projects are CAISO. There is no ERCOT here, no PJM, and not one large-load interconnection filing, which means the demand half of the story still is not in the numbers. The closest thing is a single line in one gas-plant summary guessing the unit “may support data-center demand,” and that is speculation, not a disclosed contract. So read this as what California’s supply queue reveals, not as the national load picture. The national picture needs the ERCOT and PJM feeds, and those are not landing in these pages yet.

What to watch

Two markers. Whether any of the firm thermal advances out of queue entry, because that is the first real sign California is treating 24/7 load as a generation problem rather than a storage one. And whether ERCOT’s large-load filings finally surface here, because that is the demand all of this supply is implicitly racing. Until both appear in the same issue, you are reading one side of the market and inferring the other.

Sources

• CAISO Public Queue Report, the full queue these 139 projects are drawn from: https://www.caiso.com/library/public-queue-report

• Browsable, daily-updated view of the same data:

https://www.interconnection.fyi/?market=CAISO

• Queue data ingested via gridstatus.io. Individual projects are listed by queue position in the CAISO report.

Dynawatt is an independent brief compiled from public sources (ERCOT Large Load Working Group, ISO/RTO interconnection queues, FERC & Federal Register filings). It is informational, non-advocacy, and not investment advice.

That sounds minor. It is the opposite of minor, and the reason runs straight through the documents Dynawatt tracks.

Go back to the evening of July 10, 2024, in the stretch of Northern Virginia the industry calls Data Center Alley. A lightning arrestor failed on a 230-kilovolt transmission line. The protection system did exactly what it was built to do, clearing the fault and attempting to reclose, several times in quick succession. Six faults flickered across the system in eighty-two seconds, each lasting a fraction of a second. That should have been a non-event.

Instead, roughly 1,500 megawatts of load vanished from the grid almost instantly. Around sixty data centers across two dozen substations saw the voltage dip and did precisely what they are designed to do: they cut themselves off and flipped to backup power to protect their servers. No utility shed that load. The customers shed themselves. Much of it stayed dark for hours.

Here is why grid engineers lost sleep over it. For a century, the nightmare scenario was losing supply. A power plant trips, and the system is planned and drilled to absorb the loss. Losing a gigawatt and a half of demand in an instant is a different animal, and the grid was never built for it. Drop that much load at once and voltage and frequency swing in ways the system isn’t tuned to catch. The circuit that protects a data center’s silicon can put everyone else’s power at risk.

Now multiply it. ERCOT alone has logged dozens of these load-loss events from large computing facilities in recent years. Dominion, the utility serving Data Center Alley, reported roughly 40 gigawatts of contracted data-center power by late 2024. The 1,500-megawatt scare was a rounding error against what’s coming.

This is the context for the items in Dynawatt’s feed that look like bureaucratic noise. ERCOT’s Large Load Working Group grinding through batch interconnection studies. A line about “electronic load ride-through.” NERC standing up an entirely new category of regulated entity, the Computational Load Entity, for any site over 20 megawatts. None of it makes headlines. All of it is the grid rewriting its rulebook so that the next time a fault hits Data Center Alley, the loads ride through it instead of bailing out. The demand everyone counts in gigawatts is the easy part. Teaching it to behave is the hard part, and it’s happening in working-group slide decks almost nobody opens.

While one stack of filings re-engineers the demand, another shows what’s lining up to feed it. Read the CAISO interconnection queue across the last two weeks and the answer is monotonous. Solar paired with batteries. Batteries on their own. Centennial Flats, Athos, PLUM, Darden, Umbriel, Wingtip. Project after project, the same shape: variable generation plus storage, trying to behave like firm power.

Then watch what left. In a single week, four projects over a gigawatt each withdrew from the CAISO queue. Two of them were exactly the kind of firm, dispatchable capacity that an around-the-clock load needs most: a combined-cycle gas plant and a 1,300-megawatt pumped-storage project. They walked out. The solar-and-battery hybrids kept walking in.

So here is the bet the system is placing, in plain terms. A new kind of load, large and twitchy enough to make the reliability regulator issue its rarest alarm, is being matched with a new kind of supply that is intermittent by nature and leaning on batteries to fake firmness. Maybe it works. Storage is improving fast and the economics keep getting better. But it is a bet, and the interconnection queue is where you can read the odds before anyone announces them.

This is the part of the AI-and-energy story the loud coverage skips. There is a whole genre now of maps with angry pins, organizing neighbors against the data center down the road over water and noise. That work has its place. It is not this.

Dynawatt reads the filings. The queue withdrawals, the NERC alerts, the working-group decks, the tariff dockets spread across seven grid operators in seven incompatible formats. That is where the signal lives, and it is almost always months ahead of the headline. The job is to tell you what the people who actually run the grid are worried about, in their own documents, without an agenda about whether any of it should get built.

The demand was never the interesting question. The demand was always coming. The question is whether a grid engineered to survive the loss of its largest power plant can survive loads that disconnect themselves by the gigawatt, and what’s queuing up to keep the lights on while it figures that out. The filings are already answering. Most people just aren’t reading them.

Dynawatt is an independent brief compiled from public sources (NERC alerts and reliability filings, the ERCOT Large Load Working Group, ISO/RTO interconnection queues, and FERC and Federal Register filings). It is informational, non-advocacy, and not investment advice.

Dynawatt is a weekly brief on the collision now reshaping the American power system: demand for electricity from AI and data centers is growing faster than the grid can add supply, and the gap is being negotiated in real time — in interconnection queues, working-group filings, and tariff proceedings that rarely surface in the headlines.

This brief reads those primary sources so you don’t have to. Each week it surfaces the most consequential developments in large-load interconnection, generation buildout, and the rules being written to govern both — compiled from public ERCOT, ISO/RTO, and federal filings, in a plain, non-advocacy register. The aim is signal: what happened, and why it matters to anyone building, financing, or planning around grid capacity.

It is informational, independent, and not investment advice. This inaugural issue covers the last seven days.

Large-load & data-center

⚡ ERCOT updates LEL-SSO power-variation framework; proposes three regulatory options

ERCOT presented updated guidance on managing sub-synchronous oscillations caused by AI training loads’ rapid power fluctuations, which can stress synchronous generators and cause shaft fatigue. The framework quantifies maximum continuous terminal variation (MCTV) per location; ERCOT is now soliciting industry feedback on three compliance models — project-specific limits, tiered/hybrid, or system-wide uniform caps — to balance interconnection speed, flexibility, and grid stability.

ISO: ERCOT · Type: Large Load · Stage: Rule-change · State: TX

Source

⚡ ERCOT studies 2-second LEL reconnection time, finds better grid stability

ERCOT evaluated voltage ride-through requirements for large electrical loads, testing reconnection times of 1 vs. 2 seconds post-fault across scenarios with 15.2 GW baseline load and up to 19.2 GW under higher-load conditions. Results indicate 2-second reconnection improves frequency settling and rate-of-change-of-frequency trends, supporting the NOGRR282 compliance framework for data-center and industrial loads.

ISO: ERCOT · Type: Large Load · Stage: Study · Capacity: 19.2 GW · State: TX

Source

⚡ ERCOT Large Load Working Group charter approved by TAC

ERCOT’s Large Load Working Group charter received Technical Advisory Committee approval on April 23, 2025, formalizing governance and operational procedures for coordinating hyperscale data-center and AI-compute load integration into ERCOT’s system planning and interconnection processes.

ISO: ERCOT · Type: Large Load · Stage: Rule-change · State: TX

Source

Grid, generation & regulatory

Atlas Complex: 3,200 MW solar + storage enters CAISO queue (La Paz County, AZ)

A 3,200 MW hybrid solar and battery storage project, Atlas Complex, has entered the CAISO interconnection queue in Arizona’s La Paz County — among the largest hybrid entries this cycle.

ISO: CAISO · Type: Hybrid · Stage: Queue-entry · Capacity: 3.2 GW · State: AZ

Jove Solar: 2,000 MW solar + storage enters CAISO queue

Jove Solar, a 2,000 MW photovoltaic-plus-storage hybrid in La Paz County, Arizona, has entered the CAISO interconnection queue, positioned to support California’s constrained summer-peak environment.

ISO: CAISO · Type: Hybrid · Stage: Queue-entry · Capacity: 2.0 GW · State: AZ

Angeleno Solar Farm: 1,150 MW hybrid enters CAISO queue

A 1,150 MW solar-plus-storage project in Los Angeles County has filed its initial interconnection request with CAISO — a major transmission-addition request amid rising state solar and storage targets.

ISO: CAISO · Type: Hybrid · Stage: Queue-entry · Capacity: 1.1 GW · State: CA

Windwalker Offshore: 1,000 MW offshore wind enters CAISO queue

Windwalker Offshore, a 1 GW offshore wind project in San Luis Obispo County, has filed a new interconnection request (Queue ID 1750), underscoring continued developer interest in offshore wind despite permitting and supply-chain headwinds.

ISO: CAISO · Type: Wind · Stage: Queue-entry · Capacity: 1.0 GW · State: CA

Bouse Solar + Storage: 1,000 MW hybrid enters CAISO queue (La Paz County, AZ)

Bouse Solar and Storage Plant, a 1,000 MW hybrid combining photovoltaic generation with battery storage, has entered the CAISO interconnection queue (Queue ID 2052), adding significant seasonal and diurnal balancing capability.

ISO: CAISO · Type: Hybrid · Stage: Queue-entry · Capacity: 1.0 GW · State: AZ

Dynawatt is an independent brief compiled from public sources (ERCOT Large Load Working Group, ISO/RTO interconnection queues, FERC & Federal Register filings). It is informational, non-advocacy, and not investment advice.