West Virginia Leads PJM in Queued Gas. Most of It Is One Project.

West Virginia shows up at the top of a natural list, the most queued gas of any PJM state at about 2.8 GW. That is the number behind the "build in West Virginia" story. Open it up and it does not mean what it looks like.

The headline is one project

Of that 2.8 GW, roughly 2.1 GW is a single project that has not signed an interconnection agreement, has sat in study since 2021, and carries a stated in-service date it cannot meet. It is a speculative queue entry, not deliverable capacity. The genuinely committed gas in West Virginia is one plant in engineering and procurement, pre-construction, at roughly 0.6 GW. So the state that leads PJM on the headline holds almost nothing that a buyer could actually contract on a near-term date.

West Virginia has the fuel, not the fleet

The deeper point is that West Virginia has only about 1.2 GW of existing gas generation, despite sitting on the Marcellus and Utica. It is a gas source, one of the cheapest in the country at the wellhead, but not a gas fleet. That is exactly why the state has moved to let large loads build their own generation behind the meter, in dedicated districts that bypass the interconnection queue and the capacity market.

What this changes for the buyer

Data centers and developers. "Build in West Virginia" means become your own power developer. You take on the generation, the gas supply, and the operating risk, in exchange for speed and control on cheap fuel. That is a real and, in some cases, faster path than waiting in PJM, but it is a different structure and a different risk profile than contracting deliverable grid capacity. Price it as a self-supply build, not a merchant offtake, and note that the demand you are serving mostly sits next door in Ohio and Virginia, not in West Virginia itself.

Methodology

Queue figures are reconciled from PJM's public New Services Queue (PlanningQueues feed) for West Virginia gas: capacity, interconnection-agreement status, project status, and in-service date by project. The 1.2 GW existing-gas figure is from EIA-860M by state. The behind-the-meter and microgrid-district framing reflects publicly reported West Virginia policy and is context, not a figure from our data pipeline. Deliverable counts are Tafel Power's filtered estimate, not a PJM-published category. Figures reflect mid-2026 snapshots and may have changed since.

All data compiled by Tafel Power from public sources. Framing informed by the firm's transaction advisory work in ERCOT and cross-ISO markets.