Connection queues are governed by whoever can read them

Victoria Shinder26 September 2026, 10:392 min read

Three of today's items are about the same scarce thing - a place in a connection queue - and they differ mainly in how much of the queue anyone outside the operator can see.

In Britain, a request for the project-level data behind Ofgem's estimate of about 73 GW of data-centre demand in the queue was refused as unclear, with a hint that individual projects will stay confidential when the request is refined. In the PJM region, FERC upheld the grid operator's decision to drop Oklo's 750 MW hybrid project from the current study cycle because deficiencies PJM had flagged were not fixed, while telling PJM to communicate better. And in Spain, the Institute for Just Transition has put its proposed rules for allocating up to 11 GW of reserved capacity out for public comment, including the criteria a tender would use to rank rival projects.

The asymmetry

A queue is a public resource allocated by a private process. The operator knows which applications are duplicates, which developers have land and finance, and which are placeholders waiting to be sold. Everyone else - rival developers, local authorities, investors, the public paying for the network - sees at best an aggregate. When a single number such as 73 GW drives national policy, the inability to test it is not a technicality; it means the case for reform rests on trust in the institution that measured it.

The Oklo decision shows the same asymmetry from the other side. The developer argued about consequences - 18 months of delay, higher cost. The operator's case rested on the record of what was asked and what was answered. FERC sided with the record, and was right to under the tariff, but its closing instruction to PJM concedes that developers do not always understand what is being asked of them. Clarity about the process is also information, and it too sits with the operator.

Spain is the counter-example, if a modest one. Publishing the method before allocating - first come for the less contested nodes, a criteria-based tender where demand exceeds supply - lets outsiders argue about the rules while they can still change. It does not reveal the applications themselves, and commercial confidentiality is a legitimate reason for that. But the rules are visible, and so is the choice to reward local socioeconomic commitments rather than price.

What to watch

Queue reform across Europe and the US is converging on stricter gates: milestones, deposits, and the right to remove projects that miss them. Those gates will only be seen as fair if their results can be checked. Aggregate, regularly published statistics

• how many projects entered, how many were removed and why, how much capacity reached connection - would answer most of the questions people are filing information requests about, without exposing any single developer. The operators that publish them first will spend less time defending their numbers.