research: document what 'Planned' means for the EIA 860m data

[derekeder]

Source data: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/

latest EIA 860m data in Google sheets: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12F6QeLoCQlRD_SVacDcHrm8A3B2Wb_YGs9PeGYnOYT0/edit#gid=1806491266

Questions:

• what makes a plant show up on the 'Planned' tab?
• what makes a plant show up on the 'Cancelled or Postponed' tab? Can a project that is postponed, get put back on the 'Planned' tab? Can we find reason for cancellation or postponement?

[derekeder]

spoke with Will from Vote Solar - he believes the attrition rate for the "Planned" EIA and the Report 2 data from ILSFA and ILABP are very low.

[derekeder]

follow-up thought. we could look at historical data and see how many projects in the "Planned" tab don't end up on the energized tab. Or which ones do end up on the cancelled or postponed tab. This could give us an estimate of the % chance a project has of happening.

[viennguyen2026]

The EIA survey website includes information about the EIA-860M (form, definitions, instructions, and FAQ). The EIA-860M form is required to be filled out by entities that meet certain criteria for change. It's the entities that report their status code (P,L,T,U,V,TS,etc...) and what their updated status code is. In the instructions, there are 10 status codes. All of the tabs in the excel sheet are status codes; in the sheet they've just been grouped into the clusters "operating, planned, retired, canceled or postponed".

Entities do have to give a reason for change on the form which can be "financial, equipment, permitting, or other". More detail in the FAQ (in the picture attached).

[viennguyen2026]

Some stats for the state of IL: 722 operating, 41 planned, 430 retired, and 16 canceled or postponed.

I compared the "canceled or postponed" tabs from the April 2024 EIA-860M versus the December 2015 EIA-860M (2015 was the first year that the EIA-860M data was collected) according to the EIA website. There were 9 projects that were canceled or postponed in 2015, and all were still in that category in April 2024.

[derekeder]

this is really useful! according to your data above, the Planned projects for EIA have a 98% success rate historically.

I will email Anthony Star from IPA about the other datasets.

[derekeder]

Info from IPA relevant to this:

Q: We're curious about what the 'success' rate is for a project to become energized once it reaches the ICC Approved status in Report 2. We did an evaluation of the EIA 860M data and found only 2% of projects from the 'Planned' category don't get energized.

A: The success rate is fairly high, but I don’t think we have any analysis of that rate, more anecdotal impressions. We’ve seen some community solar projects have to withdraw because they get back revised interconnection costs from the utilities that make the project untenable, and then scattered different reasons for DG projects not proceeding.