Every DER developer and utility infrastructure team has a horror story about the interconnection queue. A project that should have taken months stretches into years. A capacity offer expires because nobody caught the deadline. A restudy request sits unanswered for weeks longer than it should have.
The instinct is to blame the utility – slow processes, understaffed interconnection teams, a queue system that hasn’t kept pace with the volume of distributed energy resources trying to get online. All of that is real, but it’s not the whole story. A meaningful share of interconnection delays trace back to something closer to home: information that exists somewhere in your organization but isn’t in the hands of the person who needs it when they need it.
The clock that doesn’t pause for internal confusion
Interconnection timelines run on fixed windows. A capacity offer has a response deadline. A restudy request has a submission window. None of these deadline’s care whether the right information was easy to find internally.
When a project misses a deadline, it’s rarely because nobody knew the deadline existed. It’s because the person who needed to act on it didn’t have visibility into where the project actually stood. Engineering knew a restudy was needed. Project management didn’t know the deadline had already started ticking. By the time the information reached the right person, the window had narrowed or closed.
Where the information actually gets stuck
Interconnection status touches more parts of an organization than almost anything else in the development process. Engineering needs technical requirements. Project management needs deadlines. Finance needs timeline risk for financing conversations.
If that information lives in email threads and whichever spreadsheet was updated most recently, it’s effectively siloed even when everyone technically “has access.” A restudy notice that lands in one engineer’s inbox doesn’t automatically become visible to the project manager tracking that project’s overall timeline. Someone has to manually connect those dots, and manual connections are where deadlines slip through.
Why this gets worse as the portfolio grows
At a handful of active projects, one person can often track every interconnection milestone by memory. They know which projects are waiting on a utility response and which have an upcoming deadline.
That doesn’t scale. Once an organization has dozens of projects moving through interconnection at once, no single person can hold the full picture. And unlike a construction delay, which is visible because a physical site isn’t progressing, an interconnection delay can hide in plain sight. The project looks fine on paper right up until a deadline passes and it doesn’t.
The cost of a missed window
A missed interconnection deadline isn’t a minor paperwork issue. Depending on where a project sits in the queue, missing a response window can mean losing a position entirely, restarting a study process that took months to reach, or accepting a lower-priority slot behind projects that responded on time. For a project with real capital already invested, that’s a material hit to its economics and timeline – caused not by grid capacity constraints but by an internal information gap.
What actually prevents this
The fix isn’t a faster utility, which is largely outside an organization’s control. It’s making sure that when a deadline or a capacity offer lands anywhere in the organization, the people who need to act on it see it immediately, not whenever someone forwards the email or remembers to update a tracker.
That means interconnection status living in the same system as site and asset data, visible across engineering, project management, and development, updating as soon as something changes. When a restudy notice comes in, the person responsible for the response deadline should see it the same day, not the same month.
A question worth asking your own team
If your organization has ever missed an interconnection deadline, or come uncomfortably close, it’s worth asking honestly: was that a utility problem, or was the information sitting somewhere internally that the right person just didn’t see in time? For most teams we’ve talked to, the honest answer is closer to the second – and that’s a problem worth fixing, since it’s one you actually have the power to solve.
About Sitenna
Sitenna is the intelligent operations platform built to eliminate blind spots across modern infrastructure. By centralizing fragmented asset data and automating workflows from site acquisition through execution and management, Sitenna delivers the real-time visibility and control needed to keep projects on track. With Sitenna, infrastructure teams move faster, collaborate smarter, and scale confidently – turning complexity into clarity at every stage.
Contact us at sales@sitenna.com