Speed to Market : Delivering the Energy America Needs Now
After nearly two decades of stability, U.S. electricity demand is on the verge of record growth. By 2050, electricity demand is expected to grow by 35–50% relative to 2024 levels. This surge is driven by large industrial loads like data centers, as well as expanded electrification in sectors like transportation and heating.
To fully capture the economic benefits of industrial growth without compromising energy affordability for all customers, we need to meet this demand with new generation that can quickly come to market. Clean power provides this opportunity, with technologies that have faster speed to market and a robust pipeline of new projects waiting to deliver energy to the grid.
ACP maintains a detailed database of clean power projects and their status, allowing us to track the time it takes for new projects to move through the development process. Across the hundreds of wind, solar, and energy storage projects with available data, each technology took less than two years on average to come online after entering the advanced development phase. Once under construction, no technology averaged more than a year before completion. These values represent capacity-weighted estimates for all projects that have come online since 2016, allowing us to compare development timelines for projects that vary in size. With new large loads able to interconnect within one to two years, clean power can quickly come online and provide energy contributions necessary to keep markets stable and prices low.
Natural gas plants provide the most relevant sample of data to compare against clean power. Using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Monthly Generator Inventory, we compiled month-by-month updates for natural gas plants to track how long each project took to move through the development process.1
Among natural gas plants that have come online since 2016, our sample finds longer construction times. Combined-cycle gas turbines (CCs), the most efficient type of natural gas unit, averaged a total of 3.1 years between advanced development and coming online, spending nearly two of those years (22 months) under construction. Natural gas combustion turbines (CTs) were faster at an average of 2.2 years, but they are still slower to reach the market than wind, solar, and energy storage projects, while taking longer to construct.
Clean Power Queues
In addition to faster construction timelines, clean power has a large bench of projects in development. A recent report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that out of over 2,000 GW of capacity in active interconnection queues nationwide, 84% is comprised of wind, solar, and storage projects. This represents a robust pipeline of new generation seeking interconnection that, after clearing regulatory hurdles, can quickly move through construction to put more electrons on the grid.
To quickly and affordably meet future energy needs, we need to leverage the speed and low cost of clean energy projects.
Explore the new ACP resource, Speed to Market.
