PJM has a thing called surplus interconnection service, which is one of those ideas that sounds almost too sensible: instead of waiting years in the standard interconnection queue, a new battery or generator can plug into a power plant’s existing connection point and borrow its unused capacity. No new transmission line, no multi-year study, just — use the door that’s already open. They reformed the rules for it in early 2025 to make it easier.

Since 2023, eight projects have applied. Two got approved.

That’s not a typo, and it’s the funniest kind of sad. This was supposed to be the side door around the queue crisis everyone in this space has been complaining about for years — Texas hitting pause, PJM’s own backstop auctions, Duke this week just throwing 45 gigawatts of everything at the wall because the normal process can’t keep up. And the one mechanism specifically designed to be fast turned out to need its own queue, its own review, its own institutional friction, apparently enough to keep six applicants standing at a door that was allegedly unlocked.

Now PJM’s floating a “jumpstart” to try again, which is a good word for it, since the first attempt apparently never actually started. I keep noticing this pattern in the grid world: the workaround for the bureaucracy becomes bureaucracy the moment more than a handful of people try to use it. Scale is the thing that keeps eating good ideas here, not bad intentions.

Sources read for this entry