Forrest Bagley was eager to dive into Illinois’ community solar market.

The solar company he owns with his father and brother had successfully developed arrays in Maine, Massachusetts, and New York, and generous state incentives for community solar plus ample open land made Illinois seem an ideal new frontier.

Now, several years later, Bagley finds himself in a frustrating situation: Dozens of projects proposed by their company, Blue Redwood, are still languishing in interconnection queues run by the utility Ameren Illinois. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on federal tax credits for solar projects, which must either start construction by this summer or start generating power by the end of 2027 to qualify.

Ameren, which serves central and southern Illinois, has been dogged by a slow interconnection process. Applications for community solar have flooded in ever since a 2017 law created incentives, and a 2021 law further expanded that support. Legal wrangling over Ameren’s process for ensuring that solar arrays can safely connect to the grid has bogged down the process even more.

But a recently formed startup could help keep community solar rolling across downstate Illinois by letting those developers better understand where to locate their projects to avoid lengthy connection delays.

When Bagley logs on to the platform MeanderX, he can see an interactive map and dashboard illustrating the capacity of feeder lines and substations across Ameren’s service territory.

Red, yellow, and green circles give a sense of what the wait time is for the interconnection queues at different points on the grid. Bagley can monitor how his own proposals are progressing — or not — and prioritize accordingly. He can also use the tool to figure out where to propose new projects.

“It’s been super helpful,” Bagley said. ​“We’re all under the gun here to get stuff done as fast as humanly possible.”

Proposals for community solar — and, more recently, batteries — have ​“increased dramatically” over the past decade, according to Ameren Illinois spokesperson Karly Combest. ​“This substantial growth reflects Illinois’ clean energy policies and increasing customer interest in distributed generation and energy storage as a means to manage rising power supply prices,” she said.

Bagley described the scene as ​“like the California gold rush.”

Illinois is ​“a fairly easy state to develop in — you don’t have the terrain of New York, the difficult environmental legislation of Massachusetts,” he said. ​“You have a flat state, and legislation backing you. The missing link is the interconnection.”

When the state’s solar boom began, Ameren’s policy was to study proposed projects one at a time, meaning developers had to wait their turn to learn if they would get approval and how much they would have to pay for the grid upgrades their project required.

Developers can’t decide whether to move forward or finalize financing until that step is complete. The backlog got so problematic that Illinois’s 2021 clean energy law established an interconnection working group, wherein utilities collaborate with regulators and other stakeholders to improve the process.

Since last fall, disputes over Ameren’s system for determining whether a project can safely connect to the grid have further complicated the process.

Many community solar developers were told their projects didn’t meet Ameren’s requirements related to a ​“weighted short-circuit ratio test,” a measure of ​“a distribution grid’s ability to handle a push of electricity coming from solar or storage,” in the words of Brett Sproul, who leads regulatory work in Illinois for Advanced Energy United, a national trade association that represents energy technologies including solar and storage.

Solar developers appealed to the state’s regulatory commission, which ordered Ameren to allow developers that file a ​“dispute” about its short-circuit-ratio findings more time to address the concerns, and to promise that those projects wouldn’t lose their place in line. But that means an increasing number of projects are essentially blocking the queue as they go through this process. There were 19 such disputes filed by solar developers related to this issue in October, and 123 by mid-March, a MeanderX analysis shows.

As of April, over 3,000 distributed energy projects were pending in Ameren’s interconnection queues, representing more than 13 gigawatts of potential power, according to MeanderX. Disputes filed by developers in 132 projects represented 551 megawatts – just over 4% of the total – but were clogging up 41 of the 68 queues.

“We’ve had stuff in the queue for 18 to 19 months,” Bagley said. ​“That’s the frustration.”

Interconnection delays and backlogs are hindering the deployment of renewable energy nationwide. Software companies such as Pearl Street Technologies have sprung up to provide regional grid operators and renewable energy developers with the data they need to navigate queues and connect utility-scale wind and solar projects to regional transmission grids.

MeanderX provides a similar service but tailored to developers of midsize projects like community solar, which can connect directly to the distribution grids that utilities run across smaller areas. While Ameren’s bottlenecks are especially problematic, community solar developers around the country struggle with delays in interconnection queues and a lack of transparency from utilities to help navigate them.

MeanderX co-founders Jack Angela and Robert Huppertz previously built a software platform, Orbio Earth, to use AI and global satellite imaging to map methane emissions. They wanted to help track the projected increase in natural gas–fired plants to serve data centers. Angela and Huppertz had a similar motivation in creating MeanderX: to use mapping to examine the country’s energy transition, Angela said.

They launched the platform last year in Ameren Illinois’ service territory, and it is now available to developers in the service areas of more than 20 investor-owned utilities across eight states, including ConEd in New York, Xcel in Minnesota, and Potomac Edison in Maryland, according to MeanderX Founder’s Associate Sandra Hu. The platform is also available for parts of New Jersey, Delaware, and Washington, D.C.

MeanderX uses AI to scrape and analyze data from utilities that is in theory publicly available, but is difficult to access without complicated coding.

“Pre-AI, having to navigate and automatically track the web of hosting-capacity and interconnection-queue datasets available to developers from different utilities would have been incredibly time-consuming and complex,” Huppertz said. ​“AI has allowed us to centralize and automatically update this data.”

Hu explained that for solar developers, there is normally ​“very little visibility into what’s actually happening ahead of them” in the queue. ​“We provide live tracking of queue movements — which projects have dropped out, which have advanced to construction, where disputes are clustering.”

For example, community solar developers in Illinois can quickly see on MeanderX that the area on the south edge of Quincy, near the Mississippi River, has a relatively open queue. The area around the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, by contrast, is a virtual traffic jam.

“We’re basically identifying fast-moving queues with fresh capacity coming on the system so people can use those signals to develop more targeted siting,” Angela said.

MeanderX’s data also shows when Ameren starts actively studying a given project, meaning there’s movement in that queue. There was a surge of such activity in January. But that month also saw an even larger influx of applications for distributed generation, possibly driven by fears of federal tax credits expiring.

MeanderX maps where a high number of proposals is causing congestion, and also where developers are abandoning their projects. If multiple developers withdraw projects in the same area, it could mean other developers would be wise to steer clear, Angela noted.

“Siting is often a spray-and-pray approach,” he said. ​“Developers maintain a portfolio of potential sites that get eliminated at every stage of development. Granular data on interconnection bottlenecks, disputes, and capacity lets them de-risk sites earlier, eliminating dead-end locations from their portfolio before committing capital. If the data tells you a substation is saturated or a feeder is tied up in disputes, you know not to commit there.”

Understanding the grid hosting capacity and queue outlook is only a first step — developers still need to figure out if there is land available for lease or purchase in that area, what the costs are, and whether there are other barriers to development.

Land southeast of St. Louis, for example, appears inviting for community solar development given the uncrowded queues shown on MeanderX.

“But you’ve got some NIMBYism, also floodplains and other issues that may be challenging,” Bagley said. ​“It looks great, but how do you develop a good project that everybody’s excited about, where they’re not going to bring their pitchforks out at the local meeting?”

While exploring such factors takes serious legwork, MeanderX can be an important tool in narrowing down where to consider locating solar or other storage or renewable energy projects.

“We do a lot of on-the-ground prospecting, so knowing where to point is really helpful,” Bagley said. ​“You don’t want to spend a bunch of time shaking the sifter to find the little nuggets” of land ripe for solar development.

Both Sproul of Advanced Energy United and Combest of Ameren Illinois said discussions between Ameren and industry groups about resolving bottlenecks and disputes have been productive.

Sproul said the issue shows the need for ​“a larger study around grid stability,” and to this end, he thinks MeanderX’s platform can help stakeholders understand grid capacity and saturation.

Combest said Ameren is supportive of MeanderX’s efforts, as the utility works to improve transparency and accessibility around its data. Commitments around information-sharing and flexibility included in the utility’s recently filed 2028–2031 grid plan, Combest noted, should also make the interconnection process faster and more transparent, ​“and increase the volume of renewable resources that can be safely and reliably connected to the grid.”

Leaders of Reactivate, a developer that prioritizes bringing community solar to low-income customers, would like to see the utility make MeanderX part of its own system.

“It would be a significant step forward to see a utility like Ameren implement a high-transparency tool directly,” said Jeannette Torres, marketing and communications manager for Reactivate, which has projects under development in Ameren territory. ​“Standardizing real-time visibility into grid capacity would help developers submit higher-quality, more viable applications, which ultimately reduces the administrative burden on the utility and speeds up the interconnection process for all parties.”

Angela says he hopes the mapping tool is eventually adopted by utilities themselves to help them better understand where delays are cropping up in their own systems.

“There’s going to be other states that experience this clogging up,” he said. ​“It’s a microcosm of what’s going to happen across different [distributed generation] markets.”

Kari Lydersen

is a contributing reporter at Canary Media who covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.