On October 20, 2025, a federal regulator issued a ruling that, on its surface, appeared to be a mundane bit of procedural housekeeping. In its decision, FERC rejects NV Energy plan to allow free exit from interconnection study, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) denied a request from NV Energy, the Las Vegas-based utility. The request was simple: grant a 60-day window for companies to pull their proposed energy projects from the grid connection queue without financial penalty.
The denial was technical, citing that the proposal was not "limited in scope" and would create a "safe harbor process" not already defined in the utility's tariff. A classic bureaucratic shutdown. Most observers would read the filing, shrug, and move on.
But this isn't a story about a denied waiver. It's about the staggering numbers behind the waiver request. It’s a story about a system so overwhelmed by a sudden, speculative flood of data that a major utility tried to invent an emergency off-ramp, only to be told by regulators to stick to the established traffic laws, even as a 23-gigawatt pileup was forming behind them.
Let's look at the data, because the filings tell a story that the press releases do not. As of mid-October 2025, NV Energy’s interconnection queue—the official waiting list for new power plants to connect to the grid—contained 69 projects. The total capacity of those projects was approximately 23.1 gigawatts (GW).
To put that number in perspective, the peak electricity demand for the entire state of Nevada is around 8 GW. The utility was facing a queue of proposals nearly three times the size of the state's peak consumption. This is the first red flag.
The second, more telling, data point is the rate of change. At the end of July 2025, the queue stood at 17.6 GW. By October, it had ballooned to 23.1 GW. That’s an increase of over 30%—to be more exact, 31.25%—in a single quarter. A system designed for steady, predictable growth was suddenly hit with a deluge. What could possibly drive that kind of surge?
The answer lies in the composition of the queue itself. While solar and battery storage hybrids made up a significant portion (about 9.3 GW), the most dramatic outlier was geothermal energy. At the end of July, geothermal projects in the queue represented a respectable 350 megawatts (MW). By October 13, that figure had exploded to 3.3 GW. That’s an 842% increase in roughly 90 days.
And this is the part of the report that I find genuinely puzzling. I've analyzed market data for years, and a nearly tenfold increase in a capital-intensive sector like geothermal over a single quarter is almost unheard of. It doesn't signal a healthy, organic industrial boom. It signals a gold rush, likely triggered by shifts in federal tax credit rules under the new Trump administration. It suggests that many of these projects are not concrete, steel-in-the-ground proposals but rather speculative placeholders, designed to secure a spot in line and flip the rights later.
This transforms the interconnection queue from a simple waiting list into a highly distorted data set. It's no longer a reliable signal of future energy supply; it's a noisy, speculative mess. How can a utility possibly conduct long-term grid planning when it can't distinguish between a serious multi-billion-dollar geothermal plant and a paper-thin proposal filed to capitalize on a policy shift?
Faced with this operational nightmare, NV Energy’s proposal makes perfect sense. They weren’t asking for a permanent rule change. They were asking for a temporary, 60-day amnesty period. They wanted to give the speculators—the companies that knew their projects were unviable—a free pass to walk away. The proposal would have applied to any customer that had already paid a commercial deposit (a key, though not insurmountable, sign of initial commitment), and that money would have been returned immediately.
Think of it as a clogged drain. NV Energy saw the water rising and proposed a simple way to clear the debris so the real projects could flow through. It was a pragmatic solution to a data-driven problem. The Solar Energy Industries Association and the Interwest Energy Alliance, organizations that represent the serious players, both supported the plan. They understood that a bloated queue hurts everyone, delaying viable projects and driving up systemic costs.
But FERC didn't see a clogged drain. It saw a request to deviate from the plumbing code.
The Commission's denial was a masterclass in procedural purity. They argued that the waiver wasn't "limited in scope" and would effectively create a new process that hadn't been vetted and approved in the utility's tariff. In their view, NV Energy was asking for a special exemption that could set a precedent.
This is the fundamental disconnect. NV Energy was on the ground, looking at a spreadsheet that screamed "speculative bubble." They were trying to manage a real-world mess. FERC, from its regulatory perch, was looking at a rulebook. The rulebook doesn't have a chapter on what to do when your queue becomes a casino. So, the answer was no. The regulator acted like an algorithm executing its code, perfectly following its internal logic while remaining completely oblivious to the chaotic external reality it was supposed to be managing.
The question isn't whether FERC’s legal reasoning was sound. It probably was. The more important question is, what problem is the regulator actually trying to solve? Is its purpose to rigidly enforce a static set of rules, or is it to ensure the efficient and reliable development of the nation's energy infrastructure? Because on October 20, those two goals were in direct conflict, and procedure won.
Ultimately, FERC's decision does nothing to solve the underlying problem. The 23.1 GW logjam remains. The speculative projects are still in line, forcing NV Energy to spend time and resources studying projects that will likely never be built. The viable projects from serious developers are still stuck behind them. By choosing procedural consistency over pragmatic problem-solving, the regulator has opted to preserve the integrity of the queue's rules while sacrificing the integrity of the queue itself. The data is clear: the system is broken, and the gatekeeper just reinforced the lock.
