SPP (Southwest Power Pool)

Updated October 2026 from SPP's generator interconnection queue file of October 2, 2026. Existing and planned gas are from EIA-860M, August 2026.

SPP is known as wind country, and its queue is wind-dominated. On the test of a signed interconnection agreement and in service by 2028, SPP holds about 1.5 GW of gas across eight projects, out of 22.4 GW of gas in the queue. That is down from 2.0 GW in July, mainly because the largest project, 554 MW in Oklahoma, has reached commercial operation and left the count.

The signed, near-term gas is now spread out: about 0.5 GW in East Texas, 0.5 GW in Nebraska, 0.25 GW in Colorado, and smaller positions in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Missouri.

Almost none of it is merchant. SPP's queue file has no developer field, so we checked each project against SPP study reports, EIA-860M and state filings. About 1.3 GW, 90 percent, belongs to utilities and public-power systems replacing or adding their own units. The only confirmed merchant project is a 29 MW uprate at an existing independent plant in Missouri. Two 60 MW projects in New Mexico could not be resolved; even if both sell power, merchant signed, near-term gas in SPP is about 0.15 GW at most.

For a data center looking past the marquee markets, the Plains pair cheap land with an existing gas fleet of about 33 GW and about 9.4 GW of planned gas, though water access varies by site. A data center siting here relies on utility relationships and the existing fleet. There is effectively no merchant queue position to contract.

Winter reliability is worth weighing too. During Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, SPP directed controlled outages for the first time in its history, and cold-weather generator performance remains an active reliability focus for FERC and NERC.

The July 2026 analysis, on the earlier file, is in the SPP brief.