No Utility Has Announced a Formal Freeze
Searching for a specific utility that has formally stopped accepting new solar interconnection applications does not turn up a named, dated example. What does turn up is two real, well-documented mechanics that produce something close to the same practical effect on a homeowner or installer: a national queue so backed up that getting through it takes years, and a local hosting-capacity limit that can throttle or delay approval in a specific area. Both are worth understanding on their own terms, since neither is the same claim as “a utility stopped approving applications.”
The National Backlog Behind the Headline
LBNL’s Queued Up 2026 Edition, tracking data through the end of 2025, found 773 gigawatts of solar capacity actively seeking grid interconnection nationally, down 19% year over year. Only 32% of that capacity had a draft or executed interconnection agreement in hand. Withdrawal rates stay above 40% even after a project has signed an agreement, meaning a signed agreement is not the same as a project that actually gets built. Median time from submitting an interconnection request to signing an agreement ran well over 3 years in 2025, and the full path to commercial operation typically exceeds 5 years.
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Book a Solar CallThe Local Mechanism: Zero-Export Throttling
Separate from the national backlog, a utility can effectively limit new solar in a specific area through a hosting-capacity review, an assessment of how much distributed generation the local transformer and feeder equipment can actually absorb. Where that local capacity is constrained, a utility may approve a new system only as a strict zero-export configuration, meaning the inverter’s own power-control settings throttle production so none of it flows back onto the distribution line. That is a real, mechanical cap on a specific circuit, not a statewide or company-wide policy, and it can apply even where the utility is technically still approving new applications.
The Compensation Cap Nobody Mentions
Even where a system is approved, net-metering compensation itself is typically capped, usually somewhere between 100% and 120% of a property’s trailing 12-month energy consumption, and that cap varies by state and utility. A system sized well beyond that ceiling does not get credited for the excess it produces, a separate limit from interconnection approval itself but one that shapes how a system should be sized for a given property.
What This Means for a Sales Team Setting Expectations
Permission-to-operate review time already varies widely by utility even without a formal cap in play, from about 14 days at Duke Energy up to 30 or more days at some California utilities for the same step. Layer a hosting-capacity constraint or a queue running years behind on top of that baseline variance, and the honest timeline conversation depends heavily on the specific utility and circuit a homeowner’s property sits on, not a single national number a rep can quote with confidence everywhere.
How to Talk About a Cap That Has Not Been Announced
The accurate version of this conversation names the two real mechanics, national queue congestion and local hosting-capacity throttling, without asserting that any specific utility has formally stopped approving new solar. A rep who tells a homeowner “your utility might have to run you as zero-export if the local grid is constrained” is giving an honest, checkable answer. A rep who claims a named utility stopped taking new applications, without a dated source for that claim, is stating something this research could not confirm anywhere.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- American Public Power Association, reporting LBNL’s Queued Up 2026 Edition interconnection queue data
- Solar Permit Solutions, utility interconnection requirements for solar installers, 2026
- EnergySage, solar installation timeline, on permission-to-operate review variance by utility