The Solar Deployment Tracker

A living reference of the data-center-adjacent and hyperscaler-offtake solar projects that anchor the American electrification of the AI compute buildout.

Every solar project on this page shares one property: the value of the land underneath it is a function of energy access, not the land itself. Transmission adjacency, transformer capacity, substation availability, and offtaker relationship set the site's economic value. The panels are the commodity; the interconnect is the moat. This tracker is the Institute's ongoing reference of who is building what, where, and for whom.

The five moves that produced this pipeline

The Institute's Working Paper The Deployment Plan lays out the five federal-existing-authority moves that made the American solar buildout viable at the current scale. Each move corresponds to a category in the tracker below.

The master ledger — 47 projects

Field definitions: MW is nameplate capacity; Status is Operational, Development (permitting/construction), or Feasibility (pre-permit); COD is commercial operation date (actual or targeted); Land-value driver is the Institute's read of what specifically makes the parcel valuable.

The pattern that repeats

Reading down the ledger, five patterns show up in almost every project:

1. Transmission corridor adjacency. West Texas ERCOT West zone, Northern Virginia 500kV network, California Kern County substations, Kings Bay Georgia coastal transmission — every high-value site sits within a few miles of high-voltage transmission that developers didn't have to build.
2. Substation redevelopment. Coal plant retirements (San Juan, Kingston, Cardinal, Colstrip) come with substations already sized for gigawatt-scale power flow. The land isn't worth much; the switchgear is worth everything.
3. Hyperscaler direct-PPA offtake. Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, Apple are the six offtakers driving most new solar development. Their credit stands behind long-term PPAs that finance the projects.
4. Battery co-location. Roughly a third of new projects include co-located battery storage — Slate (140MW/560MWh), Edwards Sanborn (3,287MWh), Gemini (1,416MWh). The economics of battery arbitrage are increasingly what pushes marginal projects across the FID line.
5. State concentration. Texas, California, Virginia, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia — six states account for the vast majority of new US solar deployment. Interconnection queue speed, land availability, and hyperscaler data-center presence explain the distribution.

Who owns what — the developer concentration

The tracker also reveals the developer concentration in American solar. Ørsted, EDF Renewables, Silicon Ranch, AES Corporation, First Solar, NextEra (via subsidiaries), Longroad Energy, Enel Green Power, and Duke Energy Sustainable Solutions collectively appear on the majority of tracked projects. This is a market that has consolidated meaningfully in the past three years — a pattern that mirrors what happened in wind development a decade earlier.

The related-content block below points to the Institute's Cleveland-Cliffs case (Butler Works Hi-B grain-oriented electrical steel — the transformer supply-chain bottleneck) and the Deployment Plan working paper (the five moves in full).

Independent editorial analysis published under the Lowe v. SEC publisher exception. Not investment advice, legal advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell, develop, or finance any specific project. Project data is aggregated from public developer disclosures, EIA-860 plant-status filings, state PUC interconnection filings, SEC 10-K disclosures, and contemporaneous business press. Field entries reflect the Institute's best editorial read of publicly-reported information as of the page's last update; specific project economics, financing terms, and PPA counterparty details vary by project and should be verified against the developer's own disclosures. The Institute is not affiliated with any developer, offtaker, or utility named on this page. This is a reference for practitioners; it is not a solicitation.