Permits to shovels: red vs. blue
How far along each side's power pipeline is: under construction, permitted, or still in earlier planning.
What does it show?
How far along each side's pipeline actually is — the permits-versus-ground-broken question. The shares are surprisingly alike: 32% of the red-state pipeline is under construction versus 35% of blue's, with 59% of red and 51% of blue still in earlier planning. The difference is scale: those shares mean 70 GW physically under construction in red states versus 24 GW in blue.
Methodology
Each generator in the latest planned inventory is assigned a stage from its EIA status code — construction started (TS/U/V), approvals received (T: regulatory approvals in hand, construction not begun), earlier planning (L/P: approvals pending or not initiated) — and each side's bar shows the MW-share of its own pipeline in each stage. States are partitioned by the statewide winner of the 2024 presidential election (31 red, 20 blue including DC; ME and NE by statewide vote, ignoring their district splits). The color of a state is political fact from the 2024 result, not an estimate. Power in territories falls in neither bucket.
Limits
A snapshot of the current pipeline, not a conversion rate over time: it says where each side's queue stands today, not how fast permits become shovels. State lines are coarse: solar country inside blue states often votes red, and county-level election returns would sharpen the split at the cost of an external dataset. Differences between the buckets partly reflect what each side builds — offshore wind, concentrated in blue states, slips worst of all technologies — not only how each side permits and builds. As a robustness check, the split excluding wind entirely still shows blue-state power running later: 47% behind schedule vs 39% (the full-pipeline gap is 49% vs 41%), so the gap is not an offshore-wind artifact.