An Interconnection Queue Position Isn't a Press Strategy. Here’s What Is.

Key Takeaways:

Project planning milestones (e.g., entering an interconnection queue) might get your press release picked up, but it’s not the same as earning a feature or actual reads from your target audiences. 

Trade reporters build stories around industry stakes: market impact, reliability, cost, and communities affected.

Audiences can easily read past general announcements (e.g., expanding pipeline gigawatts), because they don’t offer relevant context to the reader or learnings to help them care.

Tie project announcements directly to larger market contexts (like solving customer/partner pain points, adapting to regulatory changes, or showcasing a unique strategic decision) to interest trade media.

Why "we're in the queue" doesn't work as a story

The U.S. clean energy transition is facing an unprecedented bottleneck to bring solar, storage, and wind projects online, in what has become the most congested interconnection environment in domestic history.

A report from Energy Markets and Policy from Berkeley Labs “showed nearly 2,600 gigawatts of energy and storage capacity,” which was “almost double the size of the current U.S. electrical grid, waiting in interconnection approval queues.”

When developers reach major internal milestones (entering a regional queue, completing a Phase II interconnection study, or securing a capacity position) the instinct is to draft a press announcement. But leading with "We secured X megawatts of queue capacity" rarely results in meaningful trade coverage.

Trade news outlets will publish project milestone updates, but before thinking of those as wins, it's worth asking what the desired press outcome is. Is it a box-checking exercise to demonstrate progress to investors or the board? Or are you looking to demonstrate industry leadership and get in front of target customers? To achieve the latter, reporters want to see stakes.

Portfolio announcements aren't stories. They're data points.

We see it constantly across clean energy trade outlets: "Company X Expands Pipeline to 10 GW by 2030," or "Developer Announces Entry into PJM Market." In a market where multi-gigawatt storage facilities are announced weekly, one announcement is simply one among many others on any given day.

While these releases frequently get picked up or logged in daily news roundups, they rarely get read beyond the headline because they represent a signpost, not a story. In other words, a reader doesn’t have to scan beyond the headline because the headline pretty much says it all.

Stating that a pipeline grew by several hundred megawatts is basically a weather report. Without an operational or strategic narrative behind it, there is no plot line for a reader to engage with because the story is a what not a why.

Here’s a quick way to tell if you really have a story: if you can take your press release, swap out your company’s name for a competitor’s, and have the story remain accurate and virtually unchanged, it is not a differentiated or press-worthy story.

If you want to turn a portfolio data point into a story that trade journalists actually want to cover, you must connect the announcement to broader market conditions — an industry trend, a customer pain point, a competitive shift — instead of leading with just another number.

What actually makes a development-stage story press-worthy

Energy trade reporters want stories that help their audience — developers, investors, utilities, and policymakers — understand where the industry is heading. 

Instead of relying on routine updates, focus on finding press-worthy angles within projects that reveal broader industry trends.

For example, Castillo Engineering's $2.5 million investment in proprietary project management software to streamline deliverables and address the industry-wide shortage of qualified solar engineers. The story shows how a company addressed a real industry problem.

Then again, a story doesn’t necessarily have to be industry-defining. Sometimes a story can just be cool, like when Distributed Energy Infrastructure completed a project during one of New York’s harshest winters (over 100 inches of snow fell!) and they toughed it out to meet local grid demand. That’s a story because it’s interesting: the protagonist overcame a conflict and succeeded.

Here are a few other effective strategies for discovering a press-worthy story:

• Highlight evolving customer or partner pain-points. Focus on what off-takers, utilities, or landowners are demanding differently today than they were a year ago or 18 months ago, and how your projects adapted to those changes.

• Discuss competitive or strategic moves. The strategic logic behind a project is often more interesting than the outcome. Explaining the decision-making process — why a team chose one ISO region over another, how they evaluated technology pairings like co-located storage, or how they structured their financing framework — provides the depth trade publications look for.

• Ground policy or market structure impacts in real-world project evidence. Demonstrating how regulatory shifts like FERC Order 2023, state-level queue reforms, tariffs, or tax credit deadlines play out on the ground gives reporters tangible evidence of market changes. 

• Offer contrarian or forward-looking market analysis. This allows developers to share a prediction on where queue or market dynamics are headed, using their project as supporting evidence rather than the headline.

  
  

Where to find compelling stories in your own projects

Look past surface-level project milestones and dig into specific, operational decisions your development team makes daily. Consider these thought starters for uncovering nuanced story angles:

1. Uncover the strategic reasoning behind your siting choices and technology pairings

Highlighting why a team selected a specific location, co-located storage with solar, or 

chose a particular technology mix offers valuable insight into broader company strategy 

and market positioning.

2. Examine how internal go/no-go criteria has shifted

What your underwriting or site-selection teams screen for today is likely different from 

their criteria 12 to 18 months ago. Frame those evolving hurdles as an industry 

benchmark to demonstrate how development standards are maturing.

3. Document how your operations adapt to regulatory shifts

When regional rule changes or queue reforms take effect, highlight how your team 

modified its approach on the ground. This can provide a helpful preview for other 

developers navigating the same regulatory landscape.

4. Track changing counterparty requirements

Look at what utilities, off-takers, or co-located end users (e.g. data centers) are 

demanding today that they weren’t before. Telling the story of how your project met those shifting demands can reveal important market dynamics.

5. Detail project logic and interconnection configuration choices

Explaining why a team selected a specific grid attachment setup, what makes that pathway easier to study or approve right now, and what other developers can learn from it transforms a routine project into an actionable case study.

Discover the nuances of your business to find stories

A strong development-stage press story isn't about where you are in the queue. It's about what your project reveals about industry dynamics, and how that's useful for the people reading trade press. 

Want help finding the story inside your next project? twentytwo & brand works with developers to identify, shape, and pitch the moments that actually earn them coverage. 

Get in touch to talk about your earned media strategy.