Advanced Energy United’s June 23 progress report on generator interconnection reform gives the seven US grid operators a mixed report card. SPP and CAISO earned “promising improvements.” PJM, ISO New England, and NYISO were rated at “expected progress.” ERCOT drew “incremental progress.” MISO was called “incomplete.”
The interesting part of the report is what it does not say. Nowhere in the scorecard is there evidence that interconnection requests, once submitted, are actually reaching commercial operation faster than in prior cycles. Reform has changed the shape of the queue, not yet its throughput.
What is moving
Cluster studies and first-ready-first-served rules, mandated by FERC Order 2023 and its follow-on compliance filings, are now live at every RTO. Gating deposits and readiness milestones have culled speculative projects at the front of the queue. AEU characterizes this as “shifting more viable projects up in the queue,” which is a real gain if you are a developer with financing and site control. It is a smaller gain if you are counting megawatts hitting the grid.
Where the friction sits
Fast-track pathways at MISO, PJM, and SPP are cited in the report as a source of tension. The concern is a two-tier queue: projects with utility, state, or federal priority get a lane, while comparable projects sit in the standard queue. AEU flags a “potential for discrimination” risk that FERC has not yet arbitrated in a durable way.
Grid operators are also negotiating a separate FERC track on large-load interconnection, driven by data center peak-load applications that in ERCOT alone reached 198 GW of requests in Q1 2026. That process, still in comment phase, is where the throughput question actually gets resolved: whether a 500 MW hyperscaler campus is treated like a generator, a load, or a hybrid.
Read for the supply chain
Reform without throughput is the status quo. If US battery, solar, and firm-capacity buildouts are gated by transmission queue times, the marginal winners are projects with existing interconnection rights, brownfield sites, or grid-adjacent land. Those attributes were already priced above pure resource quality. The AEU report is another data point that the premium is real and durable.
Coverage frame: watch the FERC large-load docket for the actual throughput signal. Order 2023 was procedural. The large-load ruling will be substantive.