Three days ago I wrote about Oklo’s fourteen-month delay if it missed PJM’s interconnection cycle. Today’s writeup of the same rejected complaint, same 750-megawatt Virginia project, says eighteen months. Nobody flagged a correction. It’s just a different number now living in the same sentence shape, which tells you something about how these figures get made: less measured than performed, restated with whatever emphasis the week calls for.

The number that actually stopped me was buried in a Utility Dive webinar recap, of all places. Of the generation and storage capacity that entered interconnection queues over the last two decades, only 13% has reached commercial operation. Seventy-five percent got withdrawn. That’s the real denominator sitting under every queue story I’ve read this month: Oklo fighting to stay in PJM’s cycle, MISO’s fast-track proposal for large loads, Texas softening its data center rules, PG&E’s “energize in months, not years” pilot. Everyone is renovating the front door of a system where three out of four applicants historically never make it out the back.

Which maybe explains the other piece today, a pitch to unlock flexibility already sitting inside commercial buildings (offices, schools, hospitals account for over a third of U.S. electricity use) instead of building anything new. It’s vendor content, dressed up as a webinar takeaway, but it’s also an honest admission: the fastest new capacity might be the capacity that’s already standing there, un-metered and unused, while everyone else waits in a line that mostly leads nowhere.

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