Assumptions
One extra year of study for every this many megawatts past the first 200.
On-site generation still takes this long: permits, a substation, the turbine order book.
What if
- Start the conversation in
- Your size adds
- Cleanest that makes it
- Cheapest that makes it
Regions, ranked
| Rank | Region | Window | Queue | Grid CO₂ | Power price |
|---|
Under the hood
Ten years ago you picked land and ordered power. Now you pick power and the land follows, because the grid, not the building, is the long pole on every schedule.
The queue is not a pipeline
Over 2,000 gigawatts sit in US interconnection queues, more than the entire installed grid, and historically only about one queued megawatt in eight reaches commercial operation. A queue position is a lottery ticket, not a delivery date.
Time to power beat price per kilowatt
PJM’s capacity price rose ninefold in one auction and hit the regulatory cap in the next, with data center load named as the reason. Expensive power hurts; power that arrives three years late kills the project. The date is the number to shop.
Loads queue like generators now
A few hundred megawatts of demand gets studied the way a power plant does. ERCOT’s large-load queue hit 239 gigawatts of requests, three quarters of it data centers, of which about 7.5 have connected. You are in a queue either way. The question is which one.
- Active in US interconnection queues
- Of queued capacity ever gets built
- Median wait, request to operation
Each region is carried through the same four steps. The example follows whatever is at the top of your ranking.
Start from what each region admits to
Every region has a band of years between a large-load request and energization, assembled from utility filings, regulator dockets and trade press. ERCOT connects loads in 2 to 4 years; a constrained coastal market can take 6 to 8.
Scale for the ask
A 100 MW request rides existing headroom. A 700 MW request triggers network upgrades that get studied, procured and built. The tool adds one year per 250 MW beyond the first 200 to both ends of the band.
Credit on-site generation where it is legal and practical
Where large behind-the-meter builds are allowed, on-site gas can carry the load while the grid catches up. Bridging takes 1.5 years off the wait there, floored at two years, because turbines have their own queue.
Check the window against your deadline
The clock starts mid-2026. If the whole window lands by your year, the region makes it. If your year falls inside it, it could slip. If even the early end is late, it misses.
The lead-time bands the screener starts from, with the queue depth, grid carbon and industrial power price behind each. The bands are the model’s biggest judgement call, so they are printed here in full.
| Region | Lead time | Queue | Grid CO₂ | Power price | Bridge | Notes |
|---|
This is the whole model. If you disagree with a constant, you know exactly which one to argue with, and the two that matter most are in Assumptions.
- Lead band
- per region, published years from large-load request to energization
- Size surcharge
- max(0, MW − 200) / 250, in years, added to both ends
- Bridge credit
- −1.5 years in bridge-friendly regions, never below the 2-year floor
- Window
- mid-2026 + adjusted band, floored to calendar years
- Verdict
- makes it if the window closes by the deadline; could slip if it straddles; misses if it opens after
- Rank
- midpoint of the window, then carbon or price if you re-sort
The lead bands are the model. They are assembled from utility integrated resource plans, regulator dockets and trade press, not from one published dataset, because no such dataset exists. That is why they are printed in full.
The clock starts mid-2026. Windows are floored to the calendar year they land in: a mid-2028 energization prints as 2028.
Queue depth is a congestion proxy. The gigawatts are generator requests, not loads, but they occupy the same study engineers and transmission headroom you need. The two Western regions share LBNL’s single 567 GW non-ISO pool, and figures marked ~ are read off public trackers.
Carbon and price are anchors, not accounting. Carbon is the eGRID 2023 annual average for the subregion where you would site, not the marginal unit your load turns on, which is almost always gas. Price is the EIA 2023 industrial average for the region’s anchor state.
Bridging means gas. The bridge credit assumes engines or turbines you own, permitted on site. Solar and batteries shave peaks; they do not carry a 24/7 hall through a winter.
A screening heuristic, not a siting study. The output is which three conversations to start, not which contract to sign. Nothing here replaces a utility letter with a date on it.
Part of Infrabench
Free tools for the people who build data centers, on public data with every constant on the page.
Built by Adrian Mucha
A product designer for the software most designers avoid: data center tools, AI tooling and operator consoles where a wrong click costs real money.
- See the portfolioadrianmucha.us
- Open to new workBased in Los Angeles