Feds Freeze Data Center Power Plan For Grid Serving 67 Million — Over Who Pays

Federal regulators suspended a plan to secure new power for data center growth on the nation’s largest grid while they examine who should pay.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) accepted most of PJM Interconnection’s one-time “backstop” procurement on Sept. 29 but suspended it until Feb. 28, 2027, and questioned how PJM planned to divide the costs among customers.

PJM — which runs the grid for about 67 million people in 13 states and Washington, D.C. — had planned to take offers from Sept. 30 through Oct. 21 for about 6.8 gigawatts of new capacity, Utility Dive reported.

“FERC’s September 29 order affirmed the substantial majority of PJM’s reliability backstop procurement proposal, finding 11 of its 15 key elements just and reasonable, while identifying several items that require additional work,” PJM said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

PJM said it does not yet have revised dates for the procurement and still plans to hold its capacity auction for the 2029/2030 delivery year in December.

“It would be premature to quantify the allocation between existing customers and new large loads before that work is complete,” the grid operator added.

FERC Chairman Laura Swett said in a concurring statement that the commission “will not be forced into accepting a deeply flawed, eleventh-hour procurement mechanism with billion-dollar implications for consumers,” according to Utility Dive.

The Data Center Coalition did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

FERC found that PJM had not shown its plan for dividing the costs was just and reasonable and offered an alternative that would assign them using updated forecasts of electricity demand, Utility Dive reported.