Analyst: Let's start with the thing everyone gets wrong. When a developer tells me their storage project has been in the queue for four years, what has actually been happening for four years?
Expert: Mostly nothing. Not a dig at anybody, it's just... okay, back up, because the sequence matters. In the old serial world your request sat behind every request ahead of you and nobody studied you until the ones in front cleared. So a project could sit there with no engineering work done on it. Nothing in the file. Call it eighteen months of nothing. Then we'd start the study, get halfway, two projects ahead of it withdraw, all your assumptions change, restudy. I've seen a request restudied four times. Each restudy is another six, seven months.
Analyst: And under the cluster process?
Expert: Different failure mode. Cluster's better, I'll say that up front, I'm not one of the people who think the reform made things worse. But we went from a line to a batch. Instead of a hundred projects waiting individually you've got a hundred and fifty landing on the same nine engineers the same Tuesday.
Analyst: Nine engineers?
Expert: Nine who could run a power flow case and then defend it in front of a regulator. Group was nineteen people. Nine were the real bench. And careful with that number, it's my group, not the industry. Transmission owners either side of us, about the same. One worse.
Analyst: Against how much active queue?
Expert: When I left, eleven hundred and something active. Eleven forty, near enough. Call it a hundred and ninety-three gigawatts of nameplate. Our system peak is twenty-two and change. First slide in every board briefing I gave for three years, and it only ever moved one way.
Analyst: A hundred and ninety-three against twenty-two. How much of that was storage or storage hybrid?
Expert: More than half by request count. By megawatts, don't hold me to it, high fifties percent, rising every cycle. Standalone storage passed solar-plus-storage in our queue sometime in 2024, which I did not see coming.
Analyst: What fraction of anything that enters actually gets built?
Expert: Everything that entered 2017 through 2020, we got about thirteen percent of the requests to commercial operation. Twelve point six, if you want the real number. I rounded up in the deck. That's from a retrospective we ran internally, spring of 2025, and I made two people check it separately.
Analyst: That's a lot lower than what gets published. I've been underwriting closer to twenty. How solid is twelve?
Expert: Published numbers include the stuff that's still pending, so they flatter it. And most people count megawatts rather than requests, which flatters it again, because the survivors are bigger than the average entrant. I counted requests.
Analyst: Fine. Twelve point six survive. Which means the other eighty-seven percent were speculative from the start.
Expert: No. That's the part everybody gets wrong, and I got it wrong too, for about six years.