Grid Equipment, Transmission and Interconnection

Electricity's bottleneck in the 2020s is not fuel or even power plants; it is the equipment and wires between the plant and the customer, and the paperwork that decides who may connect to them. A large power transformer that took about a year to deliver before 2020 took ~128 weeks on average by mid-2025, and generator step-up transformers more than 160 weeks by early 2026 (Wood Mackenzie survey; Reuters, reported). GE Vernova reported a gas-turbine backlog of 64 GW plus 58 GW of slot reservations at the end of September 2026, against factory output of ~20 GW a year (company results, Oct 2026). The United States had ~2,060 GW of generation and storage waiting in interconnection queues at the end of 2025, about twice the country's installed capacity, and the typical project that reached commercial operation in 2025 had spent ~61 months — five years — from request to operation, against ~22 months in 2008 (LBNL, Queued Up 2026, reported). Meanwhile the country built very little new high-voltage transmission, and FERC's two big reforms of the period — Order 2023 on interconnection (July 2023) and Order 1920 on long-term transmission planning and cost allocation (May 2024) — were still being implemented and litigated in 2026. This section explains the grid equipment stack and why it ran short, the economics of the turbine and transformer makers (GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, Hitachi Energy, Schneider Electric), high-voltage direct current (HVDC), transmission planning and cost allocation, interconnection queues and their reform, grid-enhancing technologies, the construction workforce (Quanta Services), and how other countries — China's State Grid above all — build faster. In the book's power equation, this is the delivery half of "route to market": a plant with no connection is stranded supply, and equipment makers who were starved of orders for a decade now hold pricing power.