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The OBBBA bucket-two 5% safe harbor documentation set that interconnection customers need on file by December 31, 2026 to preserve the four-year continuity presumption.

OBBBA bucket-two, the tranche of solar and wind projects that began construction between January 1, 2026 and July 4, 2026, has a placed-in-service deadline of December 31, 2030 under the four-year continuity safe harbor. The Treasury's Notice 2025-42 continues the 5% expenditure test as one of the two beginning-of-construction methods, and the documentation package that supports the 5% election is what carries the four-year presumption on audit. The checklist has five categories: master supply agreements dated in the bucket-two window, transferred title on components equal to at least 5% of the total project cost basis, delivery or storage records for the transferred components, a project cost basis worksheet locked to the beginning-of-construction date, and continuous efforts evidence dated to each intervening year through placed-in-service. The December 31, 2026 date is not a Treasury filing deadline. It is the internal documentation-completion date that project sponsors and their tax counsel are working to before the FY2027 audit cycle opens on 2026 returns.

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2,600+ GW
of clean power projects in US interconnection queues
20%
of US electricity from nuclear, the largest clean baseload source
5×
projected grid storage capacity growth by 2030
$10T+
energy transition investment by 2050 (BloombergNEF)
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XPLR Infrastructure Q2 2026 earnings materials (Investing.com transcript) interconnectionus-supply

XPLR forms Mammoth Plains and Carousel storage JVs with NextEra, funds equity via interconnection sales

XPLR Infrastructure disclosed in its Q2 2026 8-K that it formed two battery storage joint ventures with NextEra Energy Resources in July, Mammoth Plains and Carousel, and completed the sale of the associated surplus interconnection rights. The two projects are part of a four-project co-investment adding roughly 200 net MW of battery capacity by year-end 2027, with XPLR holding a 49% interest and net equity of approximately $80 million. Earliest construction start is Q4 2026, with the bulk of activity in 2027. Management guided to at-least-double-digit equity returns. The structure is a template for how surplus interconnection rights, not new queue positions, become the near-term unlock for US storage buildout.

McGuireWoods (docket summary) interconnectiondata-centers

FERC large-load show cause: abeyance window closes, Aug 17 filing wall next

The 45-day abeyance window under FERC's six show-cause orders (EL26-67 through EL26-72) closed Sunday. Any RTO that did not file for a stay by Aug 3 must submit its full Section 206 answer or Section 205 tariff reforms by Aug 17. The docket is the near-term inflection point for how PJM, MISO, SPP, CAISO, ISO-NE, and NYISO study, price, and interconnect large loads. Data center queue economics, co-location rules, and cost-shift protections all land in the same brief.

Energy Storage News (ESS News) solareurope

Sonnedix closes €730M solar-plus-storage refinance across four southern-European markets

A nine-bank consortium backed Sonnedix's refinancing of ~540 MW of operating PV plus two BESS assets across Italy, Spain, Portugal and France, with proceeds also earmarked for new PV and battery construction. The scale, syndicate breadth, and battery-inclusion signal that European solar-plus-storage project finance has fully recovered from the 2023-24 crunch, with lithium-backed BESS now bundled as standard collateral rather than optional add-on.

The Motley Fool (reporting on DOE announcement) smrai-demand

DOE names Nvidia, AWS, and six reactor firms to $60M Project Prometheus

The Department of Energy's Genesis Mission awarded a three-year, $60M Phase II grant to Project Prometheus, an AI-for-reactor-design program led by Idaho National Laboratory with Nvidia and Amazon Web Services. X-energy, Oklo, TerraPower, Westinghouse, Aalo Atomics, and Standard Nuclear are named participants. NuScale was not selected.

Terra-Gen (press release, via PR Newswire) solarstorage

Terra-Gen closes out 365-MW Lockhart complex with 80-MW final phase in San Bernardino County

Terra-Gen brought the 80-MW Lockhart Solar PV IV online in mid-July, completing a 365-MW solar plus 173.7-MW battery buildout at the Kramer Junction interconnect. All four phases now sell under long-term PPAs to California load-serving entities. Cupertino Electric was the EPC. The complex is jointly owned by Masdar and Igneo Infrastructure Partners.

GlobeNewswire (Heelstone / Qualitas Energy release) ai-demanddata-centers

Heelstone reaches financial close on 86 MW of Illinois solar, Meta takes the offtake

Heelstone Renewable Energy hit financial close July 20 on three Illinois PV projects totaling 86 MW, with Meta taking a long-term corporate PPA for the full environmental attribute output. ING Capital led the debt, Stonehenge Capital took the tax equity, and Knobelsdorff is EPC. COD is end of 2026. Small in isolation, but another datapoint in the hyperscaler-anchored solar pipeline that now dominates marginal US capex.

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Rows of ground-mounted photovoltaic modules on a fixed-tilt racking system, standing in for the utility-scale solar projects in the OBBBA bucket-two tranche that began construction between January 1, 2026 and July 4, 2026 and that need a completed 5% safe harbor documentation package on file by December 31, 2026 to preserve the four-year continuity presumption running to a December 31, 2030 placed-in-service deadline.
obbbabucket-2

The OBBBA bucket-two 5% safe harbor documentation set that interconnection customers need on file by December 31, 2026 to preserve the four-year continuity presumption.

OBBBA bucket-two, the tranche of solar and wind projects that began construction between January 1, 2026 and July 4, 2026, has a placed-in-service deadline of December 31, 2030 under the four-year continuity safe harbor. The Treasury's Notice 2025-42 continues the 5% expenditure test as one of the two beginning-of-construction methods, and the documentation package that supports the 5% election is what carries the four-year presumption on audit. The checklist has five categories: master supply agreements dated in the bucket-two window, transferred title on components equal to at least 5% of the total project cost basis, delivery or storage records for the transferred components, a project cost basis worksheet locked to the beginning-of-construction date, and continuous efforts evidence dated to each intervening year through placed-in-service. The December 31, 2026 date is not a Treasury filing deadline. It is the internal documentation-completion date that project sponsors and their tax counsel are working to before the FY2027 audit cycle opens on 2026 returns.
High-voltage transmission substation and interconnection equipment, standing in for the PJM expedited interconnection process approved by FERC in June 2026 for up to ten large new or uprated capacity resource requests per calendar year through the December 31, 2027 sunset.
pjmferc

PJM's expedited interconnection window, capped at ten large capacity requests per year and sunsetting December 31, 2027, is the second grid-side filter overlaying the OBBBA bucket-two solar and wind pipeline.

FERC's June 9, 2026 order in Docket ER26-1563 accepted PJM's expedited interconnection process for large new or uprated capacity resources. The mechanism approves up to ten interconnection requests per calendar year outside the reformed cluster study cycle and sunsets on December 31, 2027. The eligible pool is dispatchable capacity: gas combined-cycle, gas combustion turbine, coal life extension, nuclear uprate. Solar and wind are not the target. The relevance to the OBBBA bucket-two pipeline is second-order, on the network upgrade cost allocation and study queue capacity that the expedited window pulls off the top before the reformed cluster gets to run.
A construction crane working at a large utility-scale solar panel farm, standing in for the physical-work-of-significant-nature activity Notice 2025-42 now requires as the sole route to begin-of-construction status for solar facilities above 1.5 MWac and for all wind facilities under Sections 45Y and 48E after the July 4, 2026 OBBBA deadline.
obbbanotice-2025-42

One month past the July 4 OBBBA deadline: how Notice 2025-42 sorts wind and solar projects into three placed-in-service buckets, and where the physical work test now binds

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act's July 4, 2026 begin-of-construction deadline for the Section 45Y production tax credit and Section 48E investment tax credit is one month behind the tape. Treasury Notice 2025-42, issued August 15, 2025 and effective September 2, 2025, is the operating document that decides which projects still qualify and on what placed-in-service clock. The Notice eliminated the 5 percent cost safe harbor for all wind facilities and for solar facilities above 1.5 MWac, leaving the physical work test as the only route to a pre-July 4 begin-of-construction date for the utility-scale pipeline. This piece reads the three placed-in-service buckets that the OBBBA plus Notice 2025-42 stack creates, what the physical work test actually requires as a matter of Treasury guidance, and the specific evidentiary gap the market is now trading around.

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