One GE Vernova 7HA.02 is 384 MW. At the ~$790/kW that BNP Paribas estimates GE Vernova is now getting for a heavy-duty turbine (July 2026), that one machine is ~$300 million of equipment, and the 20% reservation payment that holds a production slot for it is ~$60 million, wired about three years before the turbine ships. GE Vernova ended June 2026 with 116 GW of gas equipment under contract, 63 GW of it as slot reservation agreements that are not yet orders, and customers had paid the Power segment $25.8 billion in advance. That cash is the currency this piece is about: what a slot costs, who has paid, where it shows up on the other OEMs’ books, and what the Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table does with it.
We cover the reservation mechanism as GE Vernova describes it in its filings, the three-OEM count of firm backlog versus reservations, the deposit pile in contract liabilities, Vertiv and Modine as the cooling and power-gear shadow of the same behavior, deposit terms by equipment class, what a reservation costs per kilowatt, the delivery years that are already gone, and the Monday actions for a buyer without a slot.
Source: Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor (compiled from GE Vernova quarterly earnings releases, SEC 8-K exhibits, April 2025 to July 2026)
Firm backlog went from 29 GW to 53 GW in five quarters; reservations went from 21 GW to 63 GW, so 54% of everything GE Vernova calls “under contract” is a deposit against a future order, not an order, and the reservation line has grown faster than backlog in every one of the five quarters.
The Reservation Is Not an Order
GE Vernova’s 10-K spells out what a slot reservation agreement is by describing what can go wrong with one: “some counterparties to slot reservation agreements may not place orders equal to the value of their reservation amount or at all, and the volume of orders we expect under such agreements may fail to materialize” (GE Vernova 10-K, January 2026). The company says it makes “capacity expansion decisions and supply commitments based on demand forecasts, orders, slot reservation agreements, and deposits.” In the cash flow statement the same instrument appears every quarter as “down payments on orders and slot reservation agreements at Power.” A reservation is a dated claim on a production position, paid for with cash, that converts to a purchase order later. Backlog, in GE Vernova’s usage, is only the converted part. The Lead-Time Monitor carries both numbers per quarter because a buyer waiting on a turbine competes with both.
Between July 2025 and June 2026 GE Vernova signed 86 GW of gas equipment contracts and shipped 19 GW. The quarterly releases give the flows: 9 GW signed in Q2 2025 (7 GW of reservations, 2 GW of orders), then 12 GW, 24 GW, 21 GW and 20 GW. Conversions from reservation to order ran 3, 7, 8, 6 and 10 GW. Shipments ran 5, 4, 3, 4 and 3 GW. The company says it reached a 20 GW annual output rate in the third quarter of 2026, rising to 24 GW in 2028 and 30 GW in 2030.
Source: Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor
In Q2 2026 GE Vernova signed 20 GW, converted 10 GW of old reservations into orders and shipped 3 GW, so the book grew by 16 GW in one quarter, the same as the whole of what it shipped in the prior five.
Pricing rides on the queue. In April 2026 CEO Scott Strazik said new bidding and winning activity was running “10% to 20% growth in price” relative to the fourth-quarter 2025 backlog, and in December 2025 the investor update said new reservations were pricing above current orders. A reservation signed in early 2025 therefore holds a price the OEM will not offer again, which is the whole reason a slot has a secondary value at all. Our Datacenter MEP Cost Table carries the turbine line at the disclosed price path, not at the price the holder locked.
Three OEMs, 246 GW of Commitments
Siemens Energy uses the same instrument and the same acronym. Its Q3 FY2026 analyst deck (August 5, 2026) lists Gas Services at “69 GW backlog / 26 GW SRAs”, with 15 GW booked in the quarter, 12 GW of it converted from slot reservation agreements, and 6 GW shipped. That is 95 GW of commitments, up from 80 GW at the end of December 2025 (22 GW for data centers) and 87 GW at the end of March 2026 (24 GW for data centers). Siemens booked 102 gas turbines in its first fiscal quarter alone, 40% of them for the US, and its CFO said in August that lead times run three years or more.
Mitsubishi Power reports differently. Its large-frame backlog was 35 GW in August 2026, up from 23 GW a year earlier, after selling 35 turbines (16 GW) in the fiscal year to March 2026. MHI does not split out reservations. Its CFO told analysts the ten large-frame orders booked in the June quarter deliver between 2028 and 2030, that the company is “being selective in the projects we contract” with US utilities, and that customer cash arrives as “advance payments that will be used over time as we execute the project backlog.” The Book-to-Bill League Table tracks the three books side by side each quarter.
Source: GE Vernova 8-K (July 2026); Siemens Energy Q3 FY2026 analyst presentation (August 2026); Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Q1 FY2026 as reported by Utility Dive (August 2026)
Add them up and the three OEMs hold 157 GW of firm backlog and 89 GW of disclosed reservations, against combined heavy-duty output that GE Vernova puts at 20 GW a year for itself and Siemens at 15 to 16 GW deliverable in 2026. Wood Mackenzie counted 110 GW of global gas turbine orders in 2025 against 60 to 70 GW of manufacturing capacity; EPRI counted 846 turbines and 100.3 GW ordered worldwide in 2025, 427 units and 43.1 GW of them in the US, more than double 2024. The Recips vs Turbines vs Fuel Cells TCO piece prices the alternatives for a buyer who cannot get into any of these books.
The Deposit Pile: $25.8 Billion at GE Vernova Power
The cash side of the reservations sits in one balance-sheet line. GE Vernova’s contract liabilities note splits “equipment and other service agreement liabilities” by segment. At Power, that line went from $7.9 billion at December 2024 to $25.8 billion at June 2026, a 3.3x increase in eighteen months (10-K; Q2 2026 10-Q). The 10-K defines the line plainly: “Contract liabilities primarily represent cash received from customers under ordinary commercial payment terms in advance of delivery of equipment orders.” Company-wide, contract liabilities and deferred income reached $40.0 billion, up $8.2 billion in calendar 2025 and another $14.1 billion in the first half of 2026.
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table (compiled from GE Vernova 10-Q and 10-K contract liability notes, SEC, February 2025 to July 2026)
Power equipment cash grew $1.7 billion across the three quarters of 2025 through September, then $3.9 billion, $3.9 billion and $7.3 billion in the three quarters since, as the company added 21, 17 and 16 GW of commitments; the cash per new gigawatt roughly doubled between the two periods, which is what rising prices and larger conversion payments look like on a balance sheet.
The ratio is the useful part. From March 2025 to June 2026 GE Vernova added 66 GW of gas commitments and $17.0 billion of Power equipment cash, ~$258 per kilowatt of new commitment (our arithmetic from the two filings; the Power line also carries nuclear, steam and hydro orders, so treat it as an upper bound). A cleaner cut: at March 2026 the Power segment held $42.4 billion of backlog and 56 GW of reservations. Valuing the reservations at BNP’s $790/kW gives ~$44 billion, so ~$86 billion of committed equipment against $18.5 billion of equipment cash: customers have paid in ~21% of what they have committed to buy. That is the number behind the $60 million in the title, and it is the default the MEP Cost Table uses for the turbine deposit line until an OEM discloses better.
The same pattern is visible in Europe. Siemens Energy raised its fiscal 2026 free cash flow guidance from a €4 to €5 billion range to around €8 billion in May 2026 and attributed it to Gas Services and Grid Technologies, “which both experience strong cash inflows driven by customer payments related to strong order momentum.” Neither company discloses a deposit percentage; both disclose the pile. Siemens does disclose the conversion mechanics: of the 15 GW it booked in the quarter to June 2026, 12 GW came out of existing slot reservation agreements, so four fifths of new firm backlog was already reserved and already partly paid for. A buyer reading a 69 GW backlog as the queue in front of them is short by the 26 GW of reservations that will convert ahead of any new order.
Vertiv’s $3.6 Billion Shadow
The reservation habit did not stay with turbines. Vertiv’s deferred revenue, the balance-sheet line where customer prepayments sit before shipment, went from $1.06 billion at December 2024 to $1.81 billion at December 2025 to $3.63 billion at June 2026, per the 10-Q and 10-K balance sheets. In the same span Vertiv’s quarterly sales went from $2.35 billion to $3.27 billion. Customers have prepaid Vertiv 1.11 quarters of sales, up from 0.45 quarters at the end of 2024. The Q2 2026 10-Q notes that $604 million of the opening deferred balance was recognized as revenue in the quarter, so roughly one dollar in six of the pile turned into shipments while five stayed put.
Source: Open Factory Book-to-Bill League Table (compiled from Vertiv 10-Q and 10-K filings via SEC XBRL, February 2023 to July 2026)
Deferred revenue sat between $500 million and $1.3 billion for eleven quarters, then added $683 million, $647 million and $1.17 billion in the last three.
The timing matters because Vertiv’s Q4 2025 release was the last to publish backlog ($15 billion), organic orders (+252%) and book-to-bill (~2.9x); the Q1 2026 and Q2 2026 releases carry none of the three. Deferred revenue is now the only public series that tracks Vertiv’s order book, which is why our Vertiv backlog estimate is built on it, and why the Book-to-Bill League Table flags Vertiv as the one OEM in the electrical group that dropped a metric mid-cycle.
Source: Open Factory Book-to-Bill League Table
The ratio of deferred revenue to that quarter’s sales ran 0.30x to 0.54x from March 2023 to September 2025, then 0.63x, 0.93x and 1.11x.
Modine put an actual number on a cooling reservation. Its FY2026 10-K discloses that in March 2026 it “entered into a long-term capacity agreement with one of its strategic data center customers” and “received a $165.0 million up-front deposit from the customer to support the Company’s investments necessary to meet the planned sales volume,” against expected sales of “more than $4 billion of data center cooling products to this customer during calendar years 2027 through 2029.” That is a 4.1% deposit for a three-year claim on a chiller factory, paid a year before the first delivery year. The 10-K also says the deposit is why operating cash flow rose despite working capital, which is the Vertiv and GE Vernova story at a smaller scale. Our cooling M&A price list covers what the majors paid to own the capacity being reserved.
Deposit Terms by Equipment Class
Nobody publishes a rate card, so we compiled what is disclosed. The table is the deposit line of the Datacenter MEP Cost Table; each row carries its source.
| Equipment class | Instrument | Deposit or security | Refund terms as disclosed | Source (date) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heavy-duty gas turbine, GE Vernova | Slot reservation agreement | ~20% implied: $18.5B Power equipment cash vs ~$86B committed (our estimate) | Reservation amount at risk if no order placed | GEV 10-Q Mar 2026; 10-K Jan 2026 |
| Heavy-duty gas turbine, Siemens Energy | Slot reservation agreement (26 GW open) | Not disclosed; “strong cash inflows driven by customer payments” | Not disclosed | Q3 FY26 deck Aug 2026 |
| Large-frame turbine, Mitsubishi Power | Order with advance payments | Not disclosed; “advance payments that will be used over time” | Not disclosed | MHI Q&A Aug 2026 |
| Data center chillers, Modine | Long-term capacity agreement | $165M up-front on >$4B of 2027 to 2029 sales (4.1%) | Not stated | Modine 10-K May 2026 |
| Thermal and power gear, Vertiv | Orders with customer deposits | Deferred revenue $3.63B, 111% of Q2 2026 sales | Not disclosed | Vertiv 10-Q Jul 2026 |
| Transformers, switchgear, gensets | Factory slot hold at land close | 10 to 30% of equipment cost | Not disclosed | Global Data Center Hub Aug 2026; Terrapin Jun 2026 |
| Recip engines, INNIO for Rehlko | Capacity reservation, then framework | 700 MW reserved, widened to 1.25 GW; terms not disclosed | Not disclosed | Power Engineering Apr 2026 |
| Grid connection, ERCOT Batch Zero | Financial security | $50,000/MW | 20% refundable; converts to non-refundable interconnection fee | ERCOT Apr 2026 |
| Grid connection, PUCT proposed 25.194 | Security plus fee | $50,000/MW at intermediate agreement, $50,000/MW non-refundable at final | 80% forfeited on withdrawal; full refund after 5 years at contracted peak | Foley Mar 2026 |
| SMR pressure vessels, X-energy and Doosan | Component reservation, 16 units | “Upfront financial commitment”, amount not disclosed | Not disclosed | POWER Dec 2025 |
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table (compiled from SEC filings, OEM presentations, ERCOT and PUCT materials; as of August 2026)
Ten instruments, three with a disclosed percentage (4.1%, 10 to 30%, ~20% implied), two with a disclosed refund rule, and the only party that tells you what happens to your money if you walk is the Texas grid operator.
Two things stand out. First, the electrical room and the turbine hall run on the same convention: Terrapin’s June 2026 note says “most manufacturers will hold a production slot for 10-30% of equipment cost,” and Global Data Center Hub describes the same 10 to 30% “at land close” with the order date “preceding groundbreaking by six to twelve months.” The transformer version of this queue, with 128 to 160 week lead times, is in Transformer Lead Times Hit 160 Weeks, and the Transformer Sizing and Cost tool returns the published lead time next to the price band. Second, the grid side has moved to the same structure with harsher terms. ERCOT’s Batch Zero requires $50,000/MW of financial security, 20% refundable, and the PUCT’s proposed rule adds a second $50,000/MW non-refundable fee at the final agreement with 80% of the security forfeited on withdrawal. For a 100 MW load that is $10 million posted before a single transformer is ordered, which the Large-Load Interconnection Cost tool and the Large-Load Cost Table carry market by market.
What a Reservation Costs per Kilowatt
The turbine deposit only has meaning against a price, and turbine prices are quoted three ways. Wood Mackenzie’s April 2026 release puts the average gas turbine at $600/kW by the end of 2027, a 195% increase since 2019, which backs out to ~$203/kW in 2019, and says the turbine is 20 to 30% of a combined-cycle project’s cost. BNP Paribas’s read on GE Vernova’s second-quarter 2026 book, as reported by Utility Dive, is ~$790/kW for heavy-duty, ~$950/kW for HA-class combined cycle and ~$1,800/kW for aeroderivatives. EPRI’s plant-level number, the whole combined-cycle station, rose from ~$2,000/kW to ~$3,000/kW in the six months to March 2026, and NRG’s 1.2 GW Texas plant for a hyperscaler implies ~$2,670/kW. William Blair’s December 2025 figure of $2,500/kW for GE Vernova turbine orders, as reported, sits 3x above BNP’s; we read it as a plant-scope number and print the conflict rather than pick.
Source: Wood Mackenzie press release (April 2026); BNP Paribas as reported by Utility Dive (July 2026); EPRI as reported by Utility Dive (March 2026); NRG Q2 2026 as reported by Utility Dive (August 2026)
The equipment range runs $600 to $1,800/kW depending on class and forecast date; the installed plant runs $2,000 to $3,000/kW, so a turbine reservation is a deposit on roughly a quarter to a third of the eventual plant.
Source: Open Factory Datacenter MEP Cost Table (compiled from GE Vernova 10-Q filings; BNP Paribas estimates as reported by Utility Dive, July 2026; Wood Mackenzie, April 2026)
Data: implied-deposit-per-kw.csv
At 20% the reservation is $158/kW on a heavy-duty frame, $190/kW on an HA combined-cycle block and $360/kW on an aeroderivative, and GE Vernova’s realized ~$258/kW of new customer cash per new GW lands between the 20% and 30% marks for its heavy-duty book.
Scale that to a campus. A 1 GW behind-the-meter block built on HA machines is ~$950 million of turbines at BNP’s estimate and ~$190 million of reservation cash, paid in 2026 for machines that ship in 2029 or 2030. A 100 MW factory bridge on aeroderivatives is ~$180 million of equipment and ~$36 million down. The Recips vs Turbines vs Fuel Cells TCO shows why buyers at the 100 MW scale have been walking to reciprocating engines instead: NGI reported in May 2026 that new large recip orders land in late 2027 at the earliest, most in 2028, which is still a year ahead of any heavy-duty slot, and Cummins and Caterpillar are sold out through 2028 on the genset side. The Genset TCO tool runs the ten-year comparison with your run hours, and the reservation cash sits in it as a year-zero outflow, not as a footnote.
Stack the deposits and the pre-construction cash for a 100 MW Texas campus is a real number before a single foundation is poured. The aeroderivative reservation is ~$36 million at 20% of BNP’s $1,800/kW. The grid side adds $5 million of ERCOT security at $50,000/MW, of which only 20% is refundable, and the PUCT’s proposed rule would add another $5 million non-refundable at the final agreement. The transformer and switchgear slot holds run 10 to 30% of their equipment cost at land close. Before the EPC is even selected, the developer has committed something on the order of $50 million of cash that is either non-refundable or refundable only after five years of operation at contracted peak, and Wood Mackenzie’s forecast says the turbine part of that bill rises another ~25% between now and the end of 2027. This is why the Large-Load Cost Table reports the security and study fees next to the equipment deposits: they are the same cash, spent in the same twelve months, and the $50 MW in 15 markets comparison shows how much of it the market choice controls.
Delivery Years: Sold Out Through 2028
The deposit buys a year, and the years are going. GE Vernova has “sold out heavy-duty turbine deliveries through 2028, with only about 10 GW of capacity remaining across 2029 and 2030” as of May 2026, down from 10 GW available in 2029 alone in January. In July the company said it is taking reservations for 2031 and expects to be more than half contracted for that year by the end of 2026, while on 2032, “we need more time before we can articulate the timing of contracting.” Jefferies, as reported by Latitude Media, puts large turbines over 90% booked for 2028 and 70% for 2029, against 65% and 33% for the smaller behind-the-meter systems.
| Delivery year | GE Vernova | Siemens Energy | Mitsubishi Power |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 20 GW/yr output rate reached Q3 2026; sold out | 15 to 16 GW deliverable in 2026; 6 GW shipped Apr to Jun | 16 GW (35 units) sold in FY2025; capacity doubling vs 2024 |
| 2027 | Not disclosed; lead time “about three years” | Large-frame capacity 35 units/yr plus 15 in 2027 | Not disclosed |
| 2028 | Sold out; capacity 24 GW/yr | Medium turbines 80 to ~100 units/yr by 2028 | Q1 FY2026 orders deliver 2028 to 2030 |
| 2029 | ~10 GW open across 2029 and 2030 (Apr 2026) | Lead times “three years or more” (Aug 2026) | Q1 FY2026 orders deliver 2028 to 2030 |
| 2030 | Capacity 30 GW/yr planned; expected sold out by end-2026 | Discussions for projects in early 2030s | Some projects 2030 to 2031 |
| 2031 | Taking reservations; more than half contracted by year-end 2026 (target) | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| 2032+ | “Need more time” before contracting (Jul 2026) | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
Source: Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor (compiled from GE Vernova 8-K, Siemens Energy and MHI earnings materials, and Utility Dive and NGI reporting; as of August 2026)
Data: delivery-year-disclosures.csv
Across the three OEMs, the earliest delivery year with disclosed open capacity is 2029, the OEM quoting the longest lead time is EPRI’s composite at more than five years for a large turbine, and the only delivery-year detail Mitsubishi gives is the 2028 to 2030 window for orders booked in mid-2026.
The small end of the market has its own queue, and it is the one most factory buyers actually stand in. EPRI’s count for 2025 puts 70% of all turbines sold under 100 MW, with the fastest growth in the 3 to 20 MW range, while H- and J-class machines were 14% of units and more than half of megawatts. Lead times for the small frames run 18 to 36 months against more than five years for a large one, and EPRI’s explanation is the forging chokepoint: “there’s a very limited number of places in the world where you can have extremely large components forged,” which bites the 400 MW rotor and not the 20 MW one. Siemens Energy is adding 20 units of medium-turbine capacity on top of 80 to reach about 100 units a year by 2028, against 35 large-frame units plus 15 more in 2027. A 20 to 40 MW plant that reserves a medium frame in 2026 is a 2028 plant; the same plant waiting on a heavy-duty block shared with a datacenter campus is a 2029 or 2030 plant. The deposit convention is the same at both ends, so the buyer’s decision is which queue to pay into, and the Lead-Time Monitor carries the two classes as separate rows for that reason.
Strazik’s own framing is that the turbine is often not the gating item: “when you’re talking about a three-year cycle from when a project starts, the EPC build out, the permitting, the fuel availability,” a 2029 turbine slot fits a plant that starts today. That is true for a utility with a site, a permit and a gas lateral. It is not true for the developer who has a reserved 2029 slot, a site under option and no air permit, and Siemens Energy’s CEO said the observable trend in 2026 was projects “being shuffled between sites based on which could secure air permits faster.” The slot is portable across sites in a way the permit is not, which is the property that makes it currency. Every behind-the-meter megawatt also needs a generator step-up transformer at 144 weeks, so the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule puts the GSU, not the turbine, on the critical path for most 2028 energizations.
What to Do Monday
For a buyer with a 50 to 500 MW load and no slot, the disclosed facts point to five actions.
Price the deposit as a line item, not a contingency. At ~20% of turbine cost, or 10 to 30% of transformer and switchgear cost at land close, the reservation cash for a 100 MW campus runs into the tens of millions and lands 24 to 36 months before the equipment. The Datacenter MEP Cost Table now carries a deposit-timing column per component so the carrying cost of that cash sits next to the carrying cost of the delay it prevents.
Ask the OEM for the reservation amount, the conversion deadline and the forfeiture rule in writing before wiring anything. GE Vernova’s 10-K refers to a “reservation amount” and to counterparties not ordering “equal to the value” of it, which means the agreement has a face value and a conversion expectation. None of the three OEMs publishes the refund terms; ERCOT and the PUCT do, and their terms (20% refundable, 80% forfeited) are the worst case to plan against. The Liquidated Damages piece covers the delivery-side clauses that should sit opposite your deposit.
Buy the slot, not the machine. A reservation written against a frame class and a delivery quarter, rather than a serial number and a site, is the version that can move to another project or another owner. Chevron and Engine No. 1 reserved seven 7HA turbines in January 2025 with no named site, and by June 2026 had assigned 2.67 GW of that capacity to a 20-year contract with Microsoft in West Texas with first power in 2028. The instrument came before the customer.
Put the GSU and the switchgear on the same reservation calendar as the turbine. The Lead-Time Monitor publishes 144 weeks for a GSU and 60 to 80 weeks for 15 kV metal-clad switchgear (Terrapin, June 2026), so a 2029 turbine slot with a 2027 GSU order is a 2029 plant, and a 2029 turbine slot with a 2028 GSU order is a 2030 plant. The Quote Check tool returns the published lead time for the class you are quoting.
Decide by year-end 2026 whether you are a 2029 buyer or a 2031 buyer. GE Vernova expects 2030 sold out by the end of this year and 2031 half contracted; Wood Mackenzie expects orders to peak in 2026. A buyer who cannot commit a deposit in 2026 should plan on recips or fuel cells for 2028 and a grid connection priced off the Large-Load Cost Table for 2030, and stop carrying a turbine in the base case.
Behind the paywall: the twelve named holders of disclosed turbine reservations, allocations and framework agreements, led by American Electric Power’s ~13 GW secured plus options on 10 GW more, what the record shows and does not show about the resale value of a 2028 slot, and the six contract terms that make a reservation transferable, all of it in the Datacenter MEP Cost Table.