What the interconnection queue's battery surge does and does not tell you

I. A queue is a signal, not a construction site

Every generator or storage project that wants to connect to the New England grid must file an interconnection request with ISO New England, and the running list of those requests is the interconnection queue. It is the closest thing the region has to a public forecast of its future power supply. At last public report, the queue's newest entries were dominated by battery storage — on the order of half or more of the proposed megawatts in recent request vintages, by the grid operator's own interconnection reporting. That share is the surge the headline writers noticed.

II. Why batteries crowd the front of the line

The reasons are structural. A battery project is small relative to a power plant, takes months rather than years to build once approved, and can site on an industrial parcel or a substation fence line with modest fuss. Its economics rest on multiple revenue streams — energy arbitrage, grid services, and capacity payments — and developers can test the market with modest capital at risk. Entering the queue costs comparatively little, which is precisely why the queue should not be confused with the construction pipeline. Cheap entry is a feature of the signal, and a warning about reading it too literally.

III. Queue position is a promise, not a project

Here is what the queue does not tell you: which projects will survive. Interconnection studies take years, and as they proceed, projects learn what their grid upgrades would cost and who shares them. A large fraction of requests — historically a majority in some years, per ISO-NE's own tracking — withdraw before completing study, once the real math arrives. Queue position guarantees a project nothing except a place in line and a study. Any headline that converts queued megawatts into coming capacity is converting intent into concrete.

IV. What the surge does tell you

The signal is still worth reading. Developers spend real money on studies, so a queue tilted toward storage means professional capital expects storage revenues to hold — expect storage to matter at evening ramp, in capacity auctions, and as a hedge against gas price spikes. It also tells you the region's planners expect a grid that increasingly needs flexibility rather than raw energy. The strongest case, then, is not that the queue's batteries will all arrive. It is that the region's power market is being reshaped around the assumption that some large fraction of them will.

V. What it means for Boston

For Boston the storage tilt is quietly useful. Urban loads with constrained substations are exactly where small, fast, siting-flexible projects help, and storage paired with demand management is a leading candidate to defer costly substation rebuilds. The honest caveat is timing: the same study backlog slowing the regional queue applies to city projects too, and queue pressure of this size is an argument for interconnection reform, not a verdict on it. Boston should read the battery surge the way a skeptic reads any ledger: as evidence of where money wants to go, pending the studies that will say where it actually can.