The Clean Energy Development Project studies Clean Energy Development Operations using project-level public data, company and entity research, and structured executive interviews. This page states how each of those inputs is handled and how evidence is classified.
Every claim we publish carries one of four labels. The categories are not blurred, combined or implied: a participant's statement is never presented as a verified fact, and our own interpretation is never presented as either.
A statement traceable to an identified public source, dataset record or document that we can cite. The source and its vintage are named alongside the claim.
Something a research participant told us. It reflects their experience and their organization's practice. We do not represent it as an industry-wide condition, and we do not independently verify it unless we say so.
Our own processing of source data or interview material — filtering, normalization, aggregation, comparison. The inputs and the operations performed on them are stated so the work can be challenged.
A judgment that goes beyond what the evidence strictly supports — a probable explanation, a working hypothesis, a direction we expect. Inference is labeled as such and is never counted as a finding.
Our starting population is the project-level interconnection queue dataset published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, containing records through year-end 2025. We filtered the complete queue for active status and for solar and/or battery technology.
active solar and/or battery-storage project records in the filtered universe
of those records identify a developer in the underlying dataset
source-derived developer identities undergoing entity resolution, after conservative normalization of those names
active project records carry no developer name in the source and require additional entity research
1,618 is a count of developer identities derived from source records, not a count of verified companies. Parent-company and entity resolution is in progress; the figure will move as it completes.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up 2026; CEDP analysis of active solar and battery-storage projects. Data through year-end 2025.
Berkeley Lab source & methodology — link pendingFive inputs, handled separately and reconciled deliberately rather than merged into a single dataset.
Public interconnection queue records are the anchor. We preserve each source record as published — including the applicant name as it appears — and never overwrite it with our own interpretation.
Queue records may name an operating developer, a subsidiary, a single-project entity, a utility or another applicant. Separately from the source record, we research which organization is responsible for development, and to which parent it belongs. Preliminary classifications are not published as industry statistics.
For resolved organizations we identify the people accountable for development, commercial and interconnection work, using public professional sources. Personal contact details are not published.
Interviews follow a consistent research instrument covering development profile, development cycle, systems, process friction and AI use — so answers can be compared across organizations. The published interview is editorial; the structured record behind it supports cross-organization analysis and is not published participant-by-participant.
Before publication, each quantitative claim is checked against its named source and its vintage recorded. Claims that cannot be traced are either labeled as analysis or inference, or removed.
If a published fact, figure or attribution is wrong, we correct it and note what changed and when. Substantive corrections are marked on the item itself rather than edited away.
Corrections address — corrections contact pending founder review.
Each revision is dated and summarized here. Where a methodology change affects a published figure, the affected item is updated and its correction noted.
Participation, permissions, attribution, conflicts and disclosure are governed separately from methodology.
Read the editorial policyState of Clean Energy Development Operations 2026 applies this methodology across ten research sections.
See the report outlineDevelopment executives can contribute their perspective to the current research.
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