Lawrence Berkeley's new dataset shows US interconnection queues fell 10% in 2025, the first meaningful contraction on record. Solar, storage, and wind all lost queue share while active natural gas capacity nearly doubled. The rebalance matters more than the totals.
Solar plus storage accounted for 91% of nameplate additions in Q1 2026, and grid operators from CAISO to PJM set fresh generation records through July. The demand side of the thesis kept validating even as headline install volume fell post-OBBBA.
The Electric Distribution Companies filed three long-term storage contracts with the Massachusetts DPU under Section 83E Round I: Jupiter Power's 700 MW / 2,800 MWh Trimount at a former Everett oil terminal, Flatiron Energy's 250 MW / 1,000 MWh Energizar in Chelsea, and Flatiron's 168 MW / 672 MWh Salt Cod on the Montaup Power Plant site in Somerset. Combined, 1,068 MW / 4,472 MWh at four-hour duration, all on brownfields with utility offtake, all targeted at the state's 5 GW by 2030 goal.
Fluence Energy signed on July 13 to provide its Smartstack system and turnkey EPC for Avantus's Rexford 2 project in Tulare County, California: 200 MW solar paired with a 200 MW / 800 MWh, four-hour battery under a 20-year PPA with Clean Power Alliance. Cells, modules, enclosures, and thermal management ship from US plants in Utah, South Carolina, and Texas, keeping the stack inside the domestic-content perimeter.
Texas moves from one-at-a-time interconnection studies to a coordinated batch model. The July 24 utility submission deadline closes the on-ramp for the inaugural cycle, with megawatt allocations for years one through six due in April 2027.
Cypress Creek Energy and Google broke ground this week on Steel River Energy Center in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Full build is 2.5 GWdc of solar plus 2.9 GWh of storage across three phases through 2029, with Google under PPA for the first two phases (1.6 GWdc, 1.9 GWh). Every major component is US-sourced: First Solar modules, 142,000-plus tons of structural steel from U.S. Steel's Big River facility in Osceola, LG Energy Solution Vertech battery systems assembled in the US.
The ERCOT Batch Zero utility eligibility filings land Friday July 24 across every transmission and distribution utility in the state with projects in the developer pool. Aggregate eligibility ratio is the headline read, but the substantive constraint the July 24 tape will disclose is inside one utility footprint. Oncor carries roughly half of the ERCOT large-load application volume by megawatts, and the Oncor eligibility filing will therefore set the effective ceiling on the April 2027 Phase 1 allocation regardless of what CenterPoint, AEP Texas, TNMP, and the municipal utilities file. The T-2 read is the Oncor sub-corridor breakdown, the Oncor stability study coverage, and the Oncor treatment of any project that flags the ride-through overlay as marginal. Those three inputs, not the state-wide aggregate, are the analytical spine of Friday's tape.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas approved the Batch Zero large-load interconnection framework on June 18. Developer submissions closed July 10. On Friday July 24, transmission and distribution utilities must file complete eligibility packages with ERCOT for every project in the pool, or that project drops out of Batch Zero and waits for the next batch. The utility filings are procedural, but the substantive read from the July 24 tape will be how far the TDU-side headroom sits below the developer-side pipeline. That gap sets the ceiling on the megawatts that can clear into the April 9, 2027 Phase 1 study allocation, and it is the first measurable data point on whether Batch Zero can absorb the ERCOT large-load queue at the pace regulators intended.
All six generation adequacy reports required by the June 18 FERC show cause orders were on the docket by close of business Monday. The substantive read across the five non-PJM filings is the ratio of projected large load additions to projected non-large-load additions, and that ratio now clusters into two groups. MISO, SPP, and PJM sit above the 0.5 threshold at which the existing tariff becomes difficult to defend as still just and reasonable. CAISO, ISO-NE, and NYISO sit below it, on smaller pipelines but tighter transmission constraints. The August 17 tariff responses will now split along those two groupings, with the first cluster filing substantive reform proposals and the second cluster filing partial defenses supplemented by narrower reforms.
Because generalist coverage buries the supply-chain and policy texture. A permitting decision on a transmission project, a DOE loan commitment to a lithium refinery, an NRC licensing milestone for an SMR, a FERC rulemaking on interconnection reform: these move capital in ways that earnings coverage misses. Clean Power Press is built for the people who track those signals.
Long-horizon. The thesis is a multi-decade buildout. The daily briefs work for tactical positioning, but the analytical frame is structural: supply-chain, policy, project-pipeline. If you're trading micro-moves on spot prices, this isn't your tool.
Energy storage and lithium, solar, nuclear and SMRs, grid and transmission, and critical minerals. Climate policy is the connective tissue. The verticals are separate editorial frames but they share a common insight: the bottleneck on every one of them is permitting, supply-chain concentration, and policy implementation, not the underlying technology.
Climate change is established science. We don't give false balance to fossil-fuel-industry framing on the science. Our editorial stance is climate-forward: the clean energy transition is necessary, urgent, and one of the most consequential investment stories of the next several decades. That's not advocacy. We report facts, cover setbacks as well as progress, and don't oversell the pace of transition.
Track marginal, watch policy, ignore most price noise. The marginal capex dollar, the marginal project entering permitting, the marginal regulatory decision: these are where the structural story moves. Average inventory levels, spot price tapes, and quarterly headlines follow later and with lower signal value.
One Sunday email, ~10 minutes to read. The week's signal-to-noise picks across energy storage, solar, nuclear, and clean power policy. What moved, what changes positioning, what's worth doing about it.
Drop your email. First issue lands when we hit a content cadence we trust.
