91 Pennsylvania generation projects — 1,758 MW of summer-peak capacity — have signed PJM Interconnection Agreements and are ready to build. They are stuck on state and local permitting. For the solar and wind subset, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's federal tax credit deadlines threaten to void project economics within 14 months. Governor Shapiro's HB 502 is the obvious vehicle, but its 25 MW eligibility threshold excludes most of the projects at risk. This is the case for lowering it to 10 MW — or lower.
Pennsylvania's active interconnection queue is overwhelmingly clean energy. Solar, storage, and solar+storage hybrids together account for 84% of the 10,400 MW pipeline. Natural gas is 4%. Whether Pennsylvania captures or forfeits this generation depends on Harrisburg. — Build Philly Now analysis of PJM Planning Queues data
Three queue snapshots, side by side. PA's legacy active queue (the population this site analyzes), the PJM-wide 2022 queue at the time PJM closed it for reform, and the PJM-wide Cycle 1 queue announced April 29, 2026 — which is mostly natural gas. The state-level breakdown of PA projects within Cycle 1 has not yet been published; this site will be updated when it is.
The bottleneck is what makes the policy necessary. The cliff is what makes the timing urgent. HB 502, with the right amendments, addresses both.
PJM has already determined these 91 projects can be safely interconnected and signed agreements with each developer. They are not waiting on engineering. They are waiting on bureaucratic process and politics. Most have been in development since 2018–2020.
Under OBBBA, solar and wind projects must "begin construction" — meet IRS Notice 2025-42's Physical Work Test — by July 4, 2026, or be fully placed in service by year-end 2027. State and local permits are the binding prerequisite.
The bill's 25 MW eligibility floor was set as a generic "utility-scale" default. PA's pipeline is overwhelmingly community-scale. Lowering the threshold to 10 MW would expand HB 502's coverage of stuck projects from 29% to 83%.
Per PJM's March 2026 disclosure, of the 103 GW of Generation Interconnection Agreements executed since 2020, only 23 GW reached commercial operation. 77% of GIA-posted projects withdrew before sending power to the grid. Permitting friction is the dominant attrition driver, and the federal cliff makes it worse.
Source: PJM, March 2026, via Heatmap, April 30, 2026PJM's 2022 queue was 66% solar by capacity. The new Cycle 1 queue (April 2026) is 48% natural gas, with solar down to 7%. The state-level breakdown of Cycle 1 PA projects is forthcoming. The 91 PA projects already in legacy queue agreements remain the population most exposed to the federal cliff today.
Source: PJM Cycle 1 announcement (April 29, 2026), via HeatmapEach PA county is shaded by total stuck capacity (signed PJM Interconnection Agreements, no commercial operation yet). Darker green = more MW. The number overlaid on each county is the count of ready-to-build projects there. We don't have parcel-level coordinates for individual projects — a single dot per project would imply more precision than we actually have. Use the controls to filter by fuel, status, or senator party — or to preview HB 502's eligibility threshold (the Policy section below walks through that analysis in detail). Click any shaded county to see every project in it and the regional representatives whose districts overlap.
Drag to see which projects HB 502 would cover at each MW threshold. The project-count number on a county dims when none of its projects meet the threshold.
Lowering the bill's eligibility threshold expands coverage at every level of the development pipeline. The chart below shows three scopes — all 340 active PA projects, the 91 ready-to-build PA projects, and the 78 cliff-exposed solar/wind projects — at thresholds from ≥5 MW to ≥100 MW.
Three rebuttals to the case for amending HB 502 are worth taking seriously. None of them undermine the threshold-amendment argument, but each shapes how the policy should be drafted.
The MPL Law Firm critique (September 2025) argued that PJM's queue, not local zoning, was historically the binding constraint — and that PA's Municipalities Planning Code already imposes timing limits on local review.
What it gets right: for the 270 active PA projects still in PJM's pre-GIA pipeline, interconnection reform is the bigger lever.
Where it falls short: it doesn't apply to the 91 ready-to-build projects, which have already cleared PJM. For them, state and local permitting is the binding constraint by definition. The MPL critique is best read as "don't let HB 502 be your only reform," not "don't pass HB 502."
It's true that an executed PJM GIA is a meaningful milestone. It's not true that it's a guarantee.
The data: per PJM's March 2026 disclosure, of the 103 GW of GIAs executed across all PJM since 2020, only 23 GW reached commercial operation. 77% of GIA-posted projects withdrew before sending power to the grid.
For PA's 78 cliff-exposed solar and wind projects, the historical attrition rate plus a hard federal deadline 14 months out is a worse setup than the 77% baseline implies. A state policy intervention is the only mechanism available to push the conversion rate higher.
PA League of Cities and PSAB have raised concerns about HB 502's preemption of local land-use controls.
What it gets right: blanket preemption with no environmental safeguards or community-benefit floor would be a real problem.
Where it falls short: the bill as drafted already includes a 90-day RESET Board determination clock, a 45-day public hearing window, and a 180-day Environmental Hearing Board appeal window. The threshold amendment doesn't change any of those safeguards — it just expands which projects qualify for the same procedural framework. The MAREC and PEC testimony record makes the same point.
Almost every county with a GIA-posted project is represented in the State Senate by a Republican. The State House split is more competitive — both parties have districts with stuck capacity. These are the legislators whose constituents stand to gain construction trades jobs, host-community PILOT revenue, and tax base if these projects break ground — and lose it if they don't.
PJM "Ready to Build" list (March 2026 snapshot — 495 projects across PJM with signed Interconnection Agreements but no commercial operation; sums to PJM's publicly-stated 54 GW figure). The 91 PA rows are the universe analyzed throughout this site. Broader PA active-queue context (340 projects, 10,421 MW) draws on the legacy Planning Queues file used in earlier versions of this analysis.
Excludes Withdrawn, In Service, and Deactivated projects. Includes Active, Engineering and Procurement, Suspended, Under Construction, and Partially in Service — 340 PA projects, 10,421 MW summer-peak capacity.
Projects with executed PJM Generation Interconnection Agreements that have not yet reached commercial operation — i.e., signed agreements with PJM, ready to build. 91 PA projects, 1,758 MW. This is the population whose engineering review is complete and whose binding constraint is now state and local permitting. Source: PJM "Ready to Build" list (March 2026 snapshot).
Solar and wind projects only. Under OBBBA, these technologies must "begin construction" by July 4, 2026 (per IRS Notice 2025-42's Physical Work Test) or be placed in service by December 31, 2027. Standalone storage and nuclear are on the original IRA timeline through 2033 and are not directly cliff-exposed.
Bill text uses "capacity," interpreted here as PJM's "MW Capacity" (summer net) field. For solar projects this typically runs lower than "MW Energy" (winter net), so the threshold semantics matter. Confirm with bill drafters before final use.
Each project is tagged with the State Senate and State House districts whose boundaries cover the project's county under PA's post-2022 redistricting. For projects pinned to county centroids (most), all overlapping districts are listed. Project locations are shown at jittered county centroids since precise lat/lon was not available in the source file. Where parcel-level coordinates are sourced, attribution becomes point-in-polygon and a single Senate + House district per project.
PJM's April 29, 2026 Cycle 1 announcement (811 projects, 220 GW system-wide) showed a dramatic shift in the PJM-wide queue mix: from 66% solar in 2022 to 48% natural gas today. The state-level breakdown of PA projects within Cycle 1 has not yet been published. The site will be refreshed when it is.
PJM's March 2026 disclosure: 103 GW of Generation Interconnection Agreements executed since 2020 produced only 23 GW of commercial operation — a 77% attrition rate. This is the historical baseline. For PA's 78 cliff-exposed solar and wind projects, the OBBBA tax-credit deadlines compress the construction window, making the attrition rate likely to run higher absent state policy intervention.
Full project list with fuel, capacity, status, county, senator, and PJM agreement flags.
CSVCoverage at 5/10/15/20/25/50/100 MW thresholds across three scopes.
CSVCounty-level rollup with project counts, MW totals, and dominant state senator.
JSONSame as primary CSV but with coordinates and full structured fields, ready for re-use in analysis tools.