LEARN / REINDUSTRIALIZATION
What Would It Take to Power Reindustrialization?
Energy is one of the nine inputs to industrial capacity, and it decomposes into six stages of its own. The binding one is almost never generation. It is the study queue, the transmission nobody has agreed to fund, and the transformer with a two-year lead time.
Key points
- Six stages sit between a decision to build and delivered firm power: site and capital, permitting, interconnection study, transmission upgrade, long-lead equipment, and fuel arrangement.
- They run on separate clocks that are only loosely coordinated, so the operating date is set by whichever finishes last.
- Generation is rarely the binding stage. More than 2,060 GW is already queued and about one part in eight of it is ever built.
- Three of the six stages have no federal series measuring their duration for industrial load.
- Adding generation without relieving the binding stage produces announcements rather than delivered power.
The chain
The arrangement is schematic and the durations are indicative rather than measured. What it shows is the property that makes power availability hard to legislate: the stages are sequenced only loosely, they are administered by different parties under different authorities, and compressing a short one moves nothing.
Where each stage actually binds
Site and capital. Rarely binding in the United States, and the stage most policy is designed to assist.
Permitting. Real and frequently overstated. The Council on Environmental Quality reports that the environmental impact statement, the form of review that dominates the argument, accounts for roughly one percent of analyses conducted under NEPA.
Interconnection. Usually the longest. Median duration from request to commercial operation exceeded five years for generation projects built in 2025. For load, which is what a factory files, no national series exists at all.
Transmission. The stage where the constraint is institutional rather than physical. High-voltage construction fell from an average of 1,700 miles a year in the early 2010s to about 350 miles a year between 2020 and 2023, because cost allocation across jurisdictions has no settled method and siting authority sits with every state a line crosses.
Long-lead equipment. More than 90 percent of American consumed power passes through a large power transformer, roughly 82 percent of those installed in 2019 were imported, and lead times for large units run beyond two years.
Fuel arrangement. Invisible until a severe winter event, at which point installed capacity and deliverable energy come apart. Gas plants generally hold no fuel on site and compete with heating demand on the same pipelines.
Institute analysisAlmost every proposal described as an energy policy operates on generation, which is the stage least likely to be binding. More than 2,060 GW of generation is already queued. The constraint sits in the study process that evaluates it, the transmission the studies keep identifying, and the equipment required to energise either. Policy aimed at the first stage of a six-stage chain will produce announcements at a rate the later stages cannot convert.
What would actually relieve it
Four things follow from the chain rather than from any position about generation technology. The first is faster and more selective interconnection, which FERC Order No. 2023 addresses through cluster studies and commercial readiness requirements, and which the AEP Ohio experience suggests financial commitment filters effectively.
The second is a workable method for allocating transmission cost across jurisdictions, which Order No. 1920 attempts and which remains contested inside the agency that issued it. The third is equipment manufacturing capacity, which requires the specialised steel one tier below it. The fourth is measurement of load interconnection, because the stage most binding on industrial siting is the one nobody compiles.
Measurement gapThree of the six stages have no federal series publishing their duration for industrial load. Load interconnection is administered utility by utility and disclosed inconsistently. Equipment lead times are reported through industry surveys rather than agency releases. Fuel deliverability under stress is estimated rather than observed. A national assessment of how long it takes to power a new factory cannot presently be assembled from public data.
How this connects to industrial capacity
The Institute Industrial Capacity Framework holds that productive capacity depends on nine inputs and is limited by whichever is scarcest. Energy is currently binding across much of the country, which is why it warranted a subject of its own rather than an entry.
What this subject adds is that the binding input decomposes. Saying energy constrains reindustrialisation is accurate and not yet actionable, because the six stages above respond to entirely different instruments. A region short of generation, a region short of transmission and a region short of transformers each require something different, and only the first is addressed by most of what is currently proposed.
Institute analysisThe Institute for American Manufacturing & Technology built this subject because the energy constraint on industrial capacity is repeatedly described at the wrong resolution. National figures average across three synchronous systems and seventy balancing authorities. Generation totals describe the stage least likely to bind. The stages that do bind are measured either regionally, privately, or not at all. Closing that gap requires working at the level where the decisions are actually made, which is the operating layer rather than the national aggregate.
Common misconceptions
That the constraint is generation. More than 2,060 GW is queued and roughly one part in eight of queued capacity is historically built. The shortage is in connecting and delivering rather than in proposing.
That there is a national answer. The binding stage differs by region and by project. A national policy calibrated to the average addresses a situation that exists nowhere in particular.
That the six stages can be run in parallel. Some can. Interconnection results determine what transmission is required, which determines what equipment must be ordered, and that sequence is not compressible by scheduling alone.
What the evidence says, and where it is contested
ContestedWhat should be done first is genuinely disputed, and the disagreement is about which stage is truly binding. One position holds that firm dispatchable generation is the shortage and that everything else follows from having something worth connecting. A second holds that generation is abundant in queues and that interconnection and transmission are the real constraints, so building more generation without relieving them simply lengthens the queue. A third holds that both are downstream of equipment and skilled labour, and that neither generation nor transmission can be built at pace without transformers and electricians that do not exist. All three are consistent with the same published data, because the data does not resolve which stage binds in a given place.
Related Institute research
What Does It Take to Reindustrialize America?
The nine inputs, of which this subject develops one.
Why Reindustrialization Requires More Electricity
The same constraint stated from the manufacturing side.
Powering the Buildout
The Institute’s demand projections across data centers, manufacturing and defense.
Sources
- North American Electric Reliability Corporation, 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment. nerc.com
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up: 2026 Edition. emp.lbl.gov
- U.S. Department of Energy, The Supply Chain Crisis Facing the Nation’s Electric Grid. energy.gov
- Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Order No. 1920 and Order No. 2023. ferc.gov
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electricity data. eia.gov
Reference entry maintained by the Institute for American Manufacturing & Technology. Figures are drawn from primary sources and cited above. Where the Institute states a position rather than a finding, it is marked as such.