The queue went electric — and the map can’t tell you who survives

1 · What America tried to build

Share of new queue entries by resource, each year from 2000. Hybrids follow the queue’s own convention — a solar+battery project counts as solar — so these bands are the generating technology, and standalone storage is the yellow band.

battery share of entries, pre‑2023
…and from 2023 on
of 2023+ entries involve a battery, counting hybrids

Gas built the queue of the 2000s. Solar took it over after 2015. Standalone storage went from a rounding error to nearly a third of everything filed — in about three years. Starts at 2000: 1995 contains a single project and 1996 none at all, so earlier years are noise, not trend.

Table view — share of entries by resource, by year

1b · The storage wave is national, not regional

Battery share of entries per county, before and after 2023. Counties with fewer than 3 entries in the window are left blank rather than shown as noise.

1995–2022
2023–2025
battery share of entries 0% 60%+ <3 entries

Table view — top 20 counties by 2023+ battery share

2 · The map everyone expects to explain the queue

The intuition is irresistible: red counties fight renewables, blue counties welcome them, so politics should predict which projects die. Here are both maps. They look nothing alike — and that is the entire finding.

County political lean
two-party Democratic share, most recent election
R+ D+
County withdrawal rate
share of resolved projects that were withdrawn
40% 100%

Counties with fewer than 5 resolved projects are blank. Withdrawal is the majority outcome almost everywhere — the right-hand map is dark nearly everywhere there is data.

2b · …and here is the proof it doesn’t

correlation between county political lean and withdrawal rate
spread in withdrawal rate across all ten lean deciles

This is the visual form of ADR‑008: rural/metro status, political lean, and state RPS were all joined leakage-safe as-of entry, and none of them move the metric. It is a real negative result, published rather than buried — and it is why this page has no “withdrawal risk by county” map. That map would be fiction.

Table view — withdrawal rate by political-lean decile