Purpose: Most utility-scale solar and battery storage capacity proposed in the United States is never built, and much of the loss occurs after a project has a site, an interconnection position and a revenue case but before financial close. This paper asks which gates in that interval account for the attrition, how they interact, and how the risk differs between contracted solar and standalone storage. 
Design: A critical review with framework synthesis covered 252 
sources: peer-reviewed energy economics, finance and engineering research, the statutory and regulatory record through September 2025, queue data and the applied procurement and risk governance literature, coded by enforcing counterparty and detection point. 
Findings: Six sequential gates emerge. A survival model, a debt-sizing identity and an expected-loss expression formalise their interaction, and a hypothetical portfolio of 70 solar and 30 storage projects gives a complete worked calculation with low, base and high pass probabilities, a Monte Carlo interval, correlated-risk scenarios and a comparison with a parallel-gate model. Under the assumed ranges 25 to 43 of 100 projects reach close; a cluster-study delay that also defeats the tax credit deadline is the most damaging correlated scenario. 
Originality: To the authors’ knowledge no prior study treats the interval as one conditional decision process whose gates are enforced by identifiable counterparties under identifiable instruments; the probabilities are assumptions to be estimated, not observed outcomes.