Stakeholders asked MISO to consider putting a hold on processing generation project proposals entering the interconnection queue in 2025 to focus on the bottlenecks formed from the 2021 and 2022 queue classes.
At an Oct. 16 Interconnection Process Working Group meeting, multiple stakeholders told MISO it may be prudent to wait to kick off studies on the 2025 queue cycle until it’s further along with the study of projects that entered three and four years ago.
New Leaf Energy’s Adam Stern said MISO has done a lot recently in terms of interconnection queue rule changes and wondered whether MISO can juggle all four queue cycles, its new automated study process and its more stringent requirements for developers.
“I think what we’ve heard recently is that the older clusters are still moving slowly because of their size and they’re subject to old rules,” Stern said.
He said MISO might consider pausing to pay “more attention to the older clusters” and clear out the backlog before turning attention to the 2025 entrants.
As of September, MISO’s interconnection queue contained 1,127 projects at 215 GW, down from more than 300 GW earlier in 2025. MISO leadership said to expect more withdrawals in the coming months due to the federal phaseout of renewable energy tax incentives. (See MISO Interconnection Queue Drops to 215 GW on Tax Incentive Phaseout.)
MISO’s 2023 cycle is down to 102 GW from the 123 GW of projects that entered. The whopping 171 GW of projects that entered in 2022 is down to just 75 GW, while the 77-GW 2021 cycle has been reduced to 38 GW. The grid operator skipped acceptance of a 2024 cycle while it tried to get a handle on study delays and design a megawatt-capped queue that could sort out projects over one year instead of three to four years.
MISO closed its application window Oct. 7 for the 2025 cycle and has begun reviewing the project applications for completeness. The cluster of projects will raise queue totals.
MISO staff at the meeting said the RTO’s prerogative is to work as quickly as possible to process the cycles simultaneously. However, Aneta Godbole of MISO’s resource utilization team asked if stakeholders wanted a future discussion on MISO possibly filing a FERC waiver to hit pause on the 2025 cycle.
Savion’s Abhishek Dinakar seconded the request for MISO to clear the backlog and finish the 2021 and 2022 queue cycles before focusing on the 2023 and 2025 cycles.
“It’s kind of an unworkable amount of uncertainty” in the analyses,” EDF Renewables’ Anton Ptak said of the RTO simultaneously trying to complete studies on four queue cycles, when cycles contain projects that are contingent on higher-queued projects’ grid upgrades.
Ptak said MISO should put as much effort as possible into finishing the legacy queue cycles.
“That’s critically important,” he said.
Clean Grid Alliance’s David Sapper said it makes sense to clear the older cycles. But he said he worried the “vibe” he’s getting from MISO is that it sees the 2021 and 2022 queue cycles as so complex and problematic that the RTO ultimately would conclude the answer is opening another queue express lane.
“I worry that it’s just setting up us for more” generation projects in the expedited queue lane, Sapper said.
MISO’s Kyle Trotter said MISO has no plans to continue the queue fast lane once it hits its 68-project limit.
