2026 study Power

The line at the gate

Phoebus, a -- MWac demo layout in Marengo County, Alabama, asks to join a 230 kV line. The developer is fictitious; the grid and the queue are public data.

1. Which line

Gen-tie to the POI--

Lines 115 kV and up within 10 mi--

2. Who is ahead

Active MW within 60 mi--

3. How long the wait

Requests that reached operation--

Median years, request to operation--

4. What one circuit carries

One 230 kV circuit, assumed rating--

Phoebus, vs a 100% limit

Query the queue in DuckDB

Assumptions and method

Inverter loading ratio --: -- MWdc is -- MWac.
One 230 kV circuit is one 795 kcmil ACSR Drake per phase at its 907 A catalog rating (Southwire, 75 C conductor, 25 C ambient, 2 ft/s wind, in sun), times sqrt(3) times 230 kV, unity power factor. A real rating comes from the utility.
The POI is the point on the HIFLD line nearest the collector substation; the layout has no POI. The gen-tie is the layout concept, -- route miles; the drawn path follows public roads.
A request sits at the HIFLD line end its POI name matches when that end is within -- mi of its county, otherwise at the county centroid. --
MW queued is a queue position, not a study result. Shares count every request of the year, withdrawn and active ones too, as Berkeley Lab counts them.

The queue file becomes a Parquet of active and built requests at build time. DuckDB-WASM reads it by HTTP range request, so the query panel runs real SQL in this page. Ring totals count the requests plotted inside the ring. HIFLD no longer serves public substations, so the station dots are the named ends of HIFLD lines.

Loading the grid

-- -- --

Ring60 mi

115 kV line161 kV line230 kV line500 kV line SolarHybridGasStorage, wind, other Phoebus AOI Gen-tie to POI Ring around POI Line end (station) Circle area is MW; faded circles sit outside the ring