About
Requested is not signed. Signed is not built.
Hundreds of gigawatts of power plants and storage are asking to connect to the U.S. grid, and the public record rarely says which requests are committed.
The history is sobering. Of the generation capacity that entered U.S. interconnection queues in 2000–2020, 13% had reached commercial operation by the end of 2025 and 75% had been withdrawn (LBNL, Queued Up 2026). That is a record about power plants, not data centers.
LOADSTAR reads one thing every day from each grid operator’s own queue file: how much of the capacity requested carries an executed interconnection agreement. Free to cite, dated, and recomputable.
What we are
LOADSTAR publishes one number: the share of capacity requested in the seven U.S. ISO/RTO generation interconnection queues (requests of 50 MW and up) that each operator’s own queue file shows with an executed interconnection agreement, read daily.
It is a floor under our current reading, not a forecast, and not a count of data-center demand. It takes no view on any project. It measures a present condition, the same way for every reader.
Every figure names its source file. The totals recompute from our public JSON, and every change of method is dated in Corrections.
how a queue file becomes the number
Why now
Large-load interconnection is now before FERC and several state commissions. Every one of those proceedings starts from the same record: what the queues request, and how much of it has actually been signed.
We take no side in any of them. We publish the reading, and the date we took it.
What it doesn’t cover
The number covers the seven ISO/RTO generation queues, requests of 50 MW and up. It does not cover utilities outside an RTO, requests below 50 MW, or large-load (demand) queues, and it never adds generation and load together.
Our reading of a queue can be wrong. When it was, we corrected it in public and the number moved: on September 29, 2026, it went down. The series is consistent from that date; earlier points used a reading later found wrong in several queues.
The source files are archived with a SHA-256 fingerprint from September 26, 2026. Earlier points cannot be recomputed from an archived file.
Mission, vision, values
Our mission: to give everyone the same dated, checkable answer to one question — of the power requested to connect, how much is signed?
Our vision: to be the number people cite when they ask how much of the grid queue is committed.
Five values, each enforced by the system itself rather than framed on a wall:
value 1
Radical verifiability
Every figure names its source file, and the totals recompute from our public JSON — check us, don’t trust us.
value 2
Honesty before citation
A number that fails its own checks is withheld, not defended. Silence beats a wrong figure.
value 3
Non-negotiable neutrality
Nobody pays to influence a number — no sponsor, no data vendor, no exception.
value 4
Automation with human gates
The system runs itself; anything irreversible or outward-facing waits for a human.
value 5
Permanence
Dated and append-only. A correction adds a dated row; where a dated row was ever edited, the edit is flagged.
Who publishes this
LOADSTAR is published by CIIE — the Computational Infrastructure Intelligence Engine, the largely automated research system that reads the queue files, archives them and recomputes the number every day.
The index is institution-first by design: no personal brand fronts it, because the authority it is building has to live in the evidence and the method, not in a person. It is answerable all the same — write to [email protected] and you get a written reply within two business days.
The index is founder-funded and pre-revenue; no data vendor, developer or utility sponsors it, and nobody pays to influence a number.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, the correction is dated and the original error is described — never silently edited away. Every change to the number, including the one that lowered it on September 29, 2026, is listed at index.loadstar.energy/corrections.
Found an error? Write to [email protected]: corrections outrank everything else on our desk.