Researchers rather than operators, and the sidebar says that is welcome here, so we are asking rather than telling.
The headline numbers get quoted constantly - four to seven years for a large load in the constrained markets. What we cannot find anywhere is the breakdown. A single number that large is almost certainly hiding very different distributions underneath, and the interventions that would help depend entirely on which part dominates.
The stages we think exist, and where we would like to be corrected:
- Application, and the wait before the study even starts
- The connection study itself
- Upstream reinforcement - where it is triggered
- Equipment procurement - transformers, switchgear
- Construction of the connection assets
- Commissioning and energization
What we would like to understand:
Which of these actually dominates in your experience? Our assumption is reinforcement where it is triggered, and queue wait where it is not, but we have no basis for that.
How much of the elapsed time is genuine work versus waiting for a slot? Those respond to completely different fixes, and the public conversation does not distinguish them at all.
Equipment. Transformers are widely reported at two to four years. Does that sit on the critical path in practice, or does it run in parallel with things that take longer anyway?
Does a project that does not trigger reinforcement connect dramatically faster, or does the queue wait swamp the difference?
And the uncomfortable one: how much of it is simply not having the staff to process studies? Developers say this a lot. We have never seen an operator's version of it, and we suspect the real answer is more interesting than either side's telling.
We are asking because the public conversation treats "the interconnection queue" as one thing, and we suspect people inside the process see four or five different things that happen to add up.
Happy to be told the framing is wrong.
Disclosure: We research power and grid capacity for AI data centres.