The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) denied a waiver request on July 2 that would have let Advanced Power Services swap the turbines planned for its Chestnut Run project, a 1,300-megawatt (MW), $2 billion combined-cycle gas plant already permitted and moving through development in Carroll County, Ohio. The project held a place in PJM Interconnection's fast-track reliability process, but Advanced Power said global demand for GE Vernova's HA.03 turbine had pushed its delivery back by at least two years, forcing the company to seek a workaround. For any facilities or procurement team counting on new generation to arrive on schedule, Chestnut Run is a clean example of a risk that financing reviews and interconnection studies were never built to catch.
What Chestnut Run Ran Into
Chestnut Run, owned by Advanced Power Services and its parent company ArcLight Capital Partners, was one of 51 projects PJM accepted into its Reliability Resource Initiative (RRI), a fast-track review created for generation that could reach commercial operation quickly enough to help close PJM's reliability gap. Combined, the RRI cohort represents roughly 9.3 to 11.8 gigawatts (GW) of proposed capacity, with PJM reporting different totals depending on the stage of the process and measurement methodology used, and to keep that timeline credible, the process bars projects from changing size or capacity interconnection rights once accepted. Chestnut Run entered the program planning to use GE Vernova's HA.03 turbine model with an in-service date of May 2030. Advanced Power told FERC that global demand for that turbine model had pushed its delivery back by at least two years, and the company asked for permission to switch to the HA.02, a different, available model, a change that would have required cutting the plant's maximum output by 55 MW, to 1.245 GW from 1.3 GW.
Why Regulators Enforced the Rule Instead of Bending It
PJM opposed the waiver directly, arguing in a June protest that granting it would hand Advanced Power an advantage over competing developers who were complying with the program's no-changes rule, and that nothing in the record showed the replacement turbines would actually arrive on time either. PJM also pointed Advanced Power toward a separate option, its Expedited Interconnection Track process, approved on June 9, as an alternative route that wouldn't require bending RRI's terms. FERC's denial followed that logic closely. The commission's standard for approving a waiver requires that it not harm third parties, and FERC found that granting one here would delay PJM's review of the other reliability projects still waiting in the same fast-track queue. The ruling demonstrates that, under PJM's reformed interconnection process, preserving procedural consistency outweighed accommodating a project facing a legitimate equipment supply constraint. FERC did not dispute that the turbine shortage was real. It concluded that bending the rule for one project, however justified, would harm every other developer relying on that same rule holding firm.
The Turbine Shortage Extends Well Past One Plant in Ohio
Chestnut Run's turbine problem is not an isolated sourcing mistake. GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, and Mitsubishi Power control most of the global market for large-scale gas turbines, and GE Vernova alone reported a combined gas turbine backlog of 100 gigawatts (GW) in the first quarter of 2026, up from 83 GW at the end of 2025, with the company's chief executive telling investors he expects turbine reservations to be sold out through 2030 by the end of this year. Manufacturers across the industry are now quoting delivery windows measured in years rather than months. The dynamic recalls what happened at Southern Company's Plant Vogtle, where specialized components and construction delays, not financing or permitting, drove years of schedule slippage on the AP1000 reactors, a lesson the power sector is relearning at gas-turbine scale. For companies relying on new gas capacity for grid reliability or as a bridge for electrification plans, equipment availability is now a variable that deserves the same scrutiny as financing or permitting, not an assumption.
What This Means for Anyone Planning Around New Gas Capacity
Chestnut Run remains in PJM's RRI process without the requested modification, meaning the project itself was not rejected, only the change Advanced Power asked for. It will proceed on its original terms rather than the delayed, downsized configuration the company sought. That leaves a reliability-critical plant without a clear path to its originally planned commercial operation date, even though a path still exists.
Companies that assumed grid reliability upgrades or large-load tariffs were backed by generation on a fixed timeline should treat turbine availability as a variable to confirm directly with developers rather than an assumption baked into their own project plans, since power, water, permitting, and capital have already converged into a single planning constraint for most large projects. Equipment lead time belongs in that same conversation now, not as a footnote but as a line item with its own schedule risk, in the same way skilled labor shortages have already forced procurement teams to renegotiate what counts as a realistic project timeline.
The projects best positioned to avoid a Chestnut Run repeat are the ones that priced equipment delivery risk into their contracts before groundbreaking, not the ones that assumed a signed interconnection agreement settled the question of when power actually arrives, a lesson that echoes what facilities teams have already learned the hard way about permit queues built for a slower era.
