The next megaproject starts with a power date

A finished building can still be an unfinished investment. The equipment may be installed, the access road open and the contractor ready to hand over the keys. If permanent power is late, the owner has a facility it cannot use as planned.

That possibility belongs near the top of the agenda when a community considers a data center, a manufacturing campus or another large electricity user. Before the announcement, before the incentives package, someone needs to ask a fairly plain question: when can this site actually be energized?

The answer needs more detail than a year on a presentation slide.

The demand forecast is only the starting point

In its 2025 update to the U.S. Data Center Energy Usage Report, published in June 2026, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that data centers could account for 11.8% of U.S. electricity consumption by 2030. Its scenarios span 9.5% to 15.3%. Those are modeled outcomes, not a tally of projects certain to open.

For a project owner, the national forecast provides context. It does not establish how much power is available at a particular substation, what must be built to serve a site or whether the necessary work fits the owner’s schedule.

A site review should therefore separate existing capacity from capacity that depends on future work. It should identify the initial load, the expansion load and the date each is needed. A campus opening one building at a time may have a different service path from a development that needs its full demand available on day one. That distinction is worth settling before the construction team prices the job.

A place in the queue is not electricity at the fence

Berkeley Lab’s Queued Up: 2026 Edition offers a useful warning about treating proposed supply as delivered supply. At the end of 2025, roughly 8,200 projects were seeking transmission-grid interconnection, representing 1,312 gigawatts of generation and about 749 gigawatts of storage.

For projects completed in 2025 in regions with available data, the median time from an interconnection request to commercial operation exceeded five years. The study also identified 549 gigawatts with a draft or executed interconnection agreement that had not yet entered commercial operation.

These figures describe generation and storage projects. The dataset excludes requests to connect electricity-consuming facilities. It would be wrong to tell a data center developer that this research establishes a five-year wait for its site.

The more useful inference is narrower: a project schedule should not assume that proposed generation will arrive simply because it appears in a queue or has reached an agreement. Owners need to understand which supply and network improvements their service plan depends on, and how those dependencies are being tracked.

Put the utility work on the project schedule

A sensible next step is a joint schedule that the owner, utility and delivery team can work from. It should identify the studies still to be completed, the facilities required, the party responsible for each task and the conditions attached to the proposed energization date.

For example, if service depends on a new substation, the schedule should say who controls the land, who orders the equipment and which approvals remain outstanding. Where a line must cross another property, the right-of-way should have an owner and a deadline too. These are basic delivery questions, but a project announcement rarely answers them.

The same discipline belongs in the budget. The parties should establish what the developer is paying for, what the utility is building and what happens if the customer’s expected load changes. A smaller first phase may help a project open earlier, but it should come with an explicit account of the cost and work deferred to the next phase.

Local officials also need a version of this schedule they can use. Road improvements, water infrastructure and workforce commitments should be considered alongside the electrical service plan. Otherwise, a community can commit its own capital against an opening date that still rests on unresolved assumptions.

This is where an early conversation can be more valuable than a polished announcement. Ask the utility to distinguish a preliminary assessment from a service commitment. Ask the owner which operations can start with the first increment of power. Ask the delivery team what it would change if energization moved by six months.

The answers may change the site choice, the phasing or the financing. Finding that out while those choices remain open is useful work.

Before the next groundbreaking, put two dates next to each other: building completion and permanent power. Then make sure the people responsible for delivering them are working from the same plan.

Infraday analysis based on the public research linked above. Published September 27, 2026.