Aug 16 – Aug 23, 2026 · 35 items
One request, two gigawatts
A 2,015 MW large-load request entered MISO’s interconnection queue this week at queue-entry stage, which makes it eligible for study. The record doesn’t name a customer. At that scale the candidates are a hyperscale campus or a heavy industrial site, and the digest reads it as data-center demand, but nothing in the filing says so.
Take the number seriously and the stage lightly. Two gigawatts of firm load is a large city’s worth of demand arriving as a single request, and MISO is not ERCOT: it has no equivalent of the Large Load Working Group process, so a request this size lands in a queue built mostly for generators. What happens next is a study, and the study phase is where most of the attrition in any queue happens. Queue entry establishes a position and a date. It does not establish that anything gets built.
It is also the only demand-side item on the wire this week. Everything else was supply, and most of the supply was paperwork.
Holtec’s two-track week
The NRC concluded Section 106 consultation on Palisades SMR’s exemption request for Pioneer Units 1 and 2 in Van Buren County, Michigan, dockets 50-616 and 50-617, with a determination that no historic properties are affected. That determination went out as individual letters to twenty-seven tribes, which is why it accounts for most of this week’s item count. One regulatory action, twenty-seven records.
The same week, Holtec submitted Revision 1 of its SMR-300 Instrumentation and Control Architecture Licensing Topical Report to the NRC, a generic design submission covering the 300 MW unit.
Those two filings are the same company working two levels of the licensing stack at once. The topical report is generic design review, the kind of document that gets approved once and then referenced by every subsequent application. The Section 106 clearance is site-specific environmental review for the two units Holtec wants to build at Palisades. Running both concurrently is the schedule-compression play, and the phased construction permit with limited work authorization that Palisades SMR filed in January is a second one. Clearing tribal consultation with no adverse finding also removes one category of contention from a proceeding that will attract others.
Worth noting for anyone reading queue data: Palisades is a restarted pressurized water reactor, not a coal site. Some summaries of these filings describe it as a coal-to-nuclear conversion. It isn’t.
The rest of the reactor paperwork
The NRC’s Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards is reviewing the construction permit application for Long Mott Generating Station, with a subcommittee meeting scheduled for September 1 and 2. Long Mott is X-energy’s Xe-100 project at Dow’s Seadrift site in Calhoun County, Texas, not South Carolina as some feed summaries have it. ACRS review is a late step, close to the Commission’s decision, which makes the September meeting the more informative date in this week’s set.
Oklo transmitted slides and supporting material from July pre-application meetings on its fuel recycling facility draft license application, filed August 19. That is the front of the funnel, years from a decision, and it is upstream infrastructure rather than generation. Track it as a supply-chain item: fast reactors need fuel, and the fuel needs a facility.
Add it up and none of this week’s nuclear activity puts electrons on a wire before the 2030s. That is not a criticism of the filings. It is the reason the 2 GW request at the top of this issue is the item that matters.
Queue movement, and a caution about queue records
The Menifee Power Bank, 680 MW of battery storage in Riverside County, entered the CAISO queue. Southern California is the constrained end of that system, so storage entering there is worth a note even at study stage.
Two ISO-NE records also changed status this week in a way the queue data reports as reaching commercial operation: a 716 MW combined-cycle unit in Essex County, Massachusetts, and a 135.5 MW wind project in Aroostook County, Maine. Both descriptions also say the projects had been withdrawn from the queue, which is contradictory, and both correspond to plants that have been operating for years. Read those as record housekeeping rather than new capacity. Queue databases log the administrative event, not the physical one, and the two come apart more often than the feeds suggest.
What to watch
The MISO study. A 2 GW request generates a system impact study, and that study is where the number either survives or gets cut. Watch for the interconnection customer to be named, which usually happens before the study concludes.
Long Mott’s ACRS meeting, September 1 and 2. ACRS is the last technical review before the Commission acts on a construction permit. Whatever the subcommittee flags is what the schedule turns on.
Whether Palisades SMR converts. Section 106 is cleared and the EIS scoping opened in June. The construction permit decision is the milestone, and the phased structure means work could start before the full permit issues.
A second large-load request in MISO. One 2 GW entry is a customer. A second inside a quarter would say the queue design is about to become the story, the way it already has in ERCOT and PJM.
Sources: MISO interconnection queue (large-load request, 2,015 MW); NRC ADAMS (Palisades SMR, LLC, Pioneer Units 1 and 2, dockets 50-616/50-617, EPID L-2026-LLE-0011; Holtec SMR-300 I&C Architecture Licensing Topical Report Rev. 1; Long Mott Energy ACRS subcommittee notice; Oklo fuel recycling facility pre-application transmittal); CAISO interconnection queue (Menifee Power Bank, 680 MW); ISO-NE interconnection queue. Long Mott siting and Palisades plant type verified against NRC project records; both differ from the feed summaries.
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. Informational, non-advocacy, not investment advice.