Wholestory

Monitoring Analytics, the independent monitor of PJM's markets, told federal regulators on 3 September to reject the Interim Resource Adequacy Service PJM filed in August — the scheme under which a new data centre brings its own generation or is curtailed first. Its objection is that the scheme collects without obliging. A load that brings nothing still pays a capacity charge, but the proposed tariff offers it no compensation for being curtailable and, the monitor argues, no enforceable curtailment rule: PJM would hand a utility an aggregate reduction target and leave 14 state jurisdictions to decide who is cut, and after three years without a shortfall the obligation lapses. The monitor also asked the commission to rule PJM's existing rules unjust and unreasonable.

The Congressional Research Service published the first nonpartisan survey of the question underneath this whole fight: have data centres raised retail electricity prices? Looking backward, largely not. It reports Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's analysis of 2019 to 2025 finding the main driver was utility investment in ageing and hardening infrastructure, alongside gas prices, storm recovery and state policy — and that states with the fastest data-centre growth generally saw prices fall, plausibly because the extra demand spread fixed costs across more sales. Looking forward, the modelling reverses: a North Carolina State-led study projects national electricity costs rising 6 to 29 percent, and up to 57 percent in some regions; a Carnegie Mellon-led one, 8 percent by 2030. The service's own reading is that data-centre demand "appears to be one of several contributing factors" behind the 2025 and 2026 increases in PJM, and that the impact in any market remains uncertain.

PJM's independent market monitor put a number on what a price ceiling was worth. Including forecast data-centre load in the last three capacity auctions raised customers' bills by $20.0 billion even with the cap Pennsylvania's governor extracted from PJM in a 2025 settlement; without it, the monitor calculates, the distortion would have been $46.4 billion — so the settlement absorbed $26.4 billion of it. The counterfactuals run against PJM's own proposed uncapped demand curve: the 2027/2028 auction would have cost 60 percent more, the 2028/2029 auction 81 percent. The next auction, for 2029/2030, falls in December and still counts forecast data-centre demand.

The body writing America's mandatory reliability standards revised its registration criteria for computational loads on 19 August, replacing the single entity it proposed in April with two — a Computational Load Owner and a Computational Load Operator — so the duty to comply has a named holder. The first draft had reached owners, tenants, colocation providers and hosts alike without saying which of them carried it. TRC Companies, a compliance consultancy, reports NERC has also lifted the registration threshold from 20 megawatts to 50; NERC's own bulletin states no figure. Comments close 18 September, and three new standards — on interconnection data, operational communications, and disturbance monitoring — went to ballot the same day. None carries a numeric ride-through or ramp limit.

The consumer advocates of Maryland, Delaware, DC, Illinois and New Jersey jointly asked FERC to reject PJM's Reliability Backstop Procurement — the one-time, 15-year, 6,831-megawatt buy meant to cover its auction shortfall — saying PJM never showed it necessary and that it leaves existing customers paying if the projected data centers are delayed or cancelled. Maryland's Office of People's Counsel puts its households' exposure at up to $562 million over 15 years, notes none of the seven Maryland projects in the forecast has a signed utility agreement, and is pressing the state commission to force peak-shaving before the 21 October lock-in. PJM says the buy is needed and matches the White House ratepayer pledge.

MISO, the grid operator for 15 states from Louisiana to Minnesota, asked FERC on 28 August to make any load over 50 megawatts meet new connection rules — monitoring, forecasts, ramp limits and ride-through — effective 4 December. It follows PJM and ERCOT but goes further, defining a "computational load": a large load with at least 25 megawatts of IT equipment, a class no US grid operator had named before, so a data center and a steel mill of equal size answer to different rulebooks. The numbers that decide compliance cost are not yet public, and because MISO meters the interconnection, not the servers, the class rests on what a customer declares. It is a proposal, not in force.

Microsoft told FERC on 21 August that American Transmission Co.'s agreements for its Mount Pleasant campus in Wisconsin fail to shield utility customers from infrastructure costs — the minimum transmission charge has no mechanism to stop WEPCo's retail customers paying for the facilities while large loads pay twice, an early-termination fee would be a windfall, and construction-work-in-progress recovery is unjustified. It cites its own signature on the White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge, and also wants a seat in setting the terms. Wisconsin's regulator says the agreements improve on past practice but are "far from fully responsive", and warns ATC's cost-allocation structure could shift interconnection costs to other customers even if demand arrives as planned; the Citizens Utility Board filed separately calling the proposal unjust and unreasonable for lacking mechanisms against cost-shifting. ATC has approval for a $600 million transmission project serving Mount Pleasant and is planning about $2 billion of data-centre-related work. Separately PowerHouse Hillwood asked FERC to reject ComEd's cancellation of a security agreement for a 1.8 GW, $20 billion data centre in Joliet, arguing Exelon's non-standard agreements reflect monopoly power where, unlike generator interconnection, no pro forma rules exist. FERC has pushed the six grid operators' show-cause responses to mid-November.

Monitoring Analytics, the independent monitor of the largest US power market, told PJM's Members Committee that existing and forecast data-centre load accounted for 9 percent of the wholesale price of power through July — $10.48 per MWh — arriving entirely through the capacity market. Across PJM's last four capacity auctions it puts the resulting increase in capacity-market revenues at $29.4 billion, and says the total "will continue to grow until the issues associated with the addition of large data center loads are addressed". Two cautions the monitor states itself: the figure excludes any data-centre effect on energy and transmission prices, so it is a floor rather than a total; and the 46 percent rise in overall wholesale cost this year, to $56.7 billion, is not attributed to data centres.

The Tennessee Valley Authority's board voted on 20 August to charge data centres under a separate, higher rate class from 1 October, lifting their power costs by about 10 percent phased over three years. TVA's chief financial officer, Tom Rice, framed it as supporting AI growth without raising residential and business bills. Data centres were 18 percent of TVA's industrial power use last year. Minutes after the rate vote the board approved SpaceXAI, formerly xAI, as a directly served customer: it pays the new rate, fully funds all dedicated transmission and interconnection facilities needed to serve it, and operates under TVA's strictest reliability and flexibility obligations. What the account does not give is the allocation mechanism inside the rate, or what happens to the data centres that buy through a local utility rather than from TVA — which is most of them.

The national deadline for rewriting the rules on connecting data centres moved three months to the right. In June the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had ordered all six of the country's organized electricity markets to show cause why their tariffs should not be found unjust and unreasonable, with preliminary findings that current rules do not adequately handle the cost and service problems large loads create. It named five things each market had to fix: faster transmission-service applications and study processes that consider alternative technologies; prevention of cost shifting, with transparency about who pays for transmission; accommodation of co-location deals and behind-the-meter generation; new transmission services for flexible large loads; and a process for studying generation that serves electrically proximate loads. Responses were due 17 August. Instead, every one of the six asked to hold the proceeding in abeyance while it wrote its own reforms, and on 14 August the commission agreed: California's operator now has until 16 November and the Southwest Power Pool until 20 November, with 90-day extensions for the Midcontinent operator, PJM, the New York operator and ISO New England. Each market's proceeding has its own docket — EL26-67 for PJM, EL26-68 for SPP, EL26-69 for New York, EL26-70 for the Midcontinent, EL26-71 for California, EL26-72 for New England. The California operator told the commission the extra time would let it finish a stakeholder process already aligned with the five categories, and said it would seek board approval of its filing by 28 October; the Southwest Power Pool said it would revise its High Impact Large Load process and its transmission-service agreements to carry operational requirements for such loads. The commission rejected an objection from American Municipal Power and warned the Midcontinent operator and its transmission owners that if their eventual response does not meet the preliminary findings, it will decide the questions itself through the show-cause proceeding. It also released the Western Area Power Administration and six California municipal utilities — Anaheim, Azusa, Banning, Colton, Pasadena and Riverside — which argued they are outside its jurisdiction while saying they are coordinating with the California operator and are willing to file tariff revisions of their own.

PJM turned the second half of its large-load package into a live federal case, filing at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — docket ER26-3515, with a requested effective date of 12 October 2026 — a framework built on a simple rule: a new data centre or other large load must bring, build or buy its own new generation, or accept being curtailed ahead of ordinary customers when supply runs short. The obligation is narrower than the headline: a New Large Load is one entering service or adding demand after 1 June 2027 with a cumulative peak of at least 50 megawatts at a single electrical site, affiliated facilities within a mile counting as one site — and crossing that threshold does not by itself trigger anything. Only the portion of demand its supplier has not matched with designated qualifying new capacity is exposed to the new Interim Resource Adequacy Service, so a load that covers its registered peak faces no curtailment at all. What counts as cover is broad: new generation, uprates, surplus interconnection service, repowered plant, fuel conversions, storage, certain demand and distributed-energy resources, or capacity allocated from the backstop procurement PJM filed in July. For the remainder, when the grid approaches dangerously low supply, utilities would be directed to reduce or transfer that demand before any measure that shuts off traditional consumers, including residents, and before calling on the load-management customers who are paid in advance to curtail; a curtailed load can earn a reliability credit or, per the Ratepayer Protection Pledge the filing is built around, waive it. The plan leans on the Large Load Registry PJM's board directed in July — proposed Schedule 11 would require a site's location, peak demand, ramp schedule, telemetry, backup generation and supply contracts — and adds a sharper lever: beginning with the 2029/2030 capacity auction, unsupported new large load would be subtracted from the demand PJM procures capacity to serve. As with the board's July direction, the retail question is pushed downward — which specific customers bear the cost, and how, is left to state-level entities. PJM attributes 30 of the 32 gigawatts of demand growth it forecasts between 2024 and 2030 to data centres, and asked FERC to rule within 60 days. Nothing is in force; this is the connect-and-manage piece that runs alongside the Reliability Backstop Procurement PJM filed on 31 July, and it needs federal approval before it binds anyone.

Representative Andrea Salinas of Oregon introduced the Data Center Community Reinvestment Act of 2026 (H.R. 10102), which would levy a federal excise tax of one cent on every kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed by a data centre with more than a megawatt of power capacity. Her office estimates the tax would raise about .76 billion a year, divided among the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the Housing Trust Fund, the Hazardous Substance Superfund, the Highway Trust Fund and a newly created Energy Technology Trust Fund. It is worth being precise about what that does and does not do: the bill contains no mechanism that reduces anyone's utility rate. The revenue goes to unrelated federal programmes, not to offsetting the transmission and capacity costs that state commissions are now allocating; the case for it is that the industry should contribute to public costs, not that a household bill will fall. It has been referred to three committees — Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Science, Space and Technology — and is at the earliest stage of the legislative process. Four days later Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas said he was finalising a different instrument, a 'Ratepayer Bill of Rights Act' aimed at the allocation itself: it would require data centres to pay all project-driven costs, bar those costs from being passed to households, farmers, ranchers and small businesses, require a binding cost-recovery agreement and financial security before service begins, and prohibit the use of separate entities, meters, tenants, parcels or phases to evade the law — the same anti-fragmentation problem PJM's registry threshold tries to solve. That bill has not been filed; Cuellar said he would introduce it when Congress returns. Three related measures he co-sponsors have passed out of committee, including one that would require states to consider standards for data centres to pay for power production and infrastructure. Nothing here is law, and the federal government has so far left cost allocation to the states.

The Louisiana Public Service Commission voted 3-1 to overturn a subpoena that would have forced Meta to produce the evidence behind its claims about the Hyperion campus in Richland Parish — including the amount of electricity the data centre will actually need. An administrative law judge had issued the subpoena in July at the request of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, the Union of Concerned Scientists and Earthjustice, ordering Meta to substantiate its stated economic investment, its permanent job creation and its load. Meta resisted, first moving to quash the subpoena and then asking the commission itself to review the judge's ruling rather than let the case proceed; the commission's vote grants that review and overrules the judge, which leaves the motion to quash moot. Commissioner Lewis dissented and Commissioner Campbell was absent; more than forty residents attended to oppose the request. The docket, U-37882, is not an abstract transparency fight: it is Entergy Louisiana's application to fast-track approval for seven more gas plants to serve the campus, on top of three the commission approved last year, and the commission is expected to vote on that application in December. The load figure the subpoena sought is the number that would show whether the new plants are sized to the data centre or to something larger — and whether the risk of paying for them, if the demand does not arrive, sits with the customer or the company. No American operator publishes per-site consumption, and after this ruling Louisiana's regulator will decide without holding it.

The independent monitor of PJM's markets, Monitoring Analytics, published its assessment of the first half of 2026 and — for the first time on a clean half-year basis — separated out what data centres are adding to the wholesale bill. Including data-centre load in the capacity market raised the total cost of wholesale power by $11.11 a megawatt-hour, or 9.7 percent, lifting it from $103.40 to $114.50 over January-to-June; the figure is the capacity-market effect alone and excludes any impact on energy or transmission costs, so it is a floor, not a ceiling. The driver is the capacity market the monitor has criticised all year: the total cost of capacity per megawatt-hour rose 207 percent, from $6.39 to $19.61, year on year. Its president, Joseph Bowring, drew the line the report is organised around — PJM's energy market produced competitive results in the first half of 2026, but the capacity auctions for the 2025/2026, 2026/2027 and 2027/2028 delivery years were "not competitive, primarily as a result of the inclusion of forecast demand for data centers," which is why the monitor continues to recommend that forecast data-centre demand be removed from the capacity market and that data centres be required to bring their own new generation. It is the same prescription PJM's own filings have now, in part, adopted.

The Virginia State Corporation Commission ordered Dominion Energy to develop a tariff assigning the cost of transmission infrastructure directly to the data centres and other large-load customers that trigger it — establishing that a network or substation upgrade that would not have been built but for a large-load customer should be charged to that customer rather than spread across all ratepayers. The order came in Dominion's rider T1 transmission rate-adjustment case, in which the utility sought to recover about $1.5 billion; the commission's approach shifts more of that onto large loads, trimming the average residential customer's share to roughly $0.94 a month from an original $2.90 request. It builds on the commission's November 2025 order creating the GS-5 rate class for customers of 25 megawatts or more — effective 1 January 2027, with an 85 percent minimum demand charge on transmission and distribution — and names candidates for direct assignment, including the Valley Link 765-kilovolt line between Lynchburg and Culpeper. The commission conceded the tariff "may not address all instances," and the timing of the tariff ruling and the exact residential savings are not yet set. The tariff is directed to be developed, not yet in force.

Four days after its board directed the action, PJM filed its Reliability Backstop Procurement plan at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (docket ER26-3380-000), converting the board direction into a live proceeding. The filing sets the calendar and the price the board decision had left open: a one-time backstop auction would run from 30 September to 21 October 2026 to fill the 6.8-gigawatt shortfall its last base auction could not, with results due by 2 December, and it proposes to cap accepted supply at $555 per megawatt-day — more than the $325 ceiling that bound the base auction. The Natural Resources Defense Council, reading the filing, estimated PJM would pay as much as $20 billion for the new power plants needed to serve data centres built through 2027. The cost-allocation question the board flagged is unchanged in the filing: it "relies on each of the PJM states to refine ... which retail loads ... should be allocated the costs," so state commissions still decide who ultimately pays, and absent a state framework the backstop's costs default to all load in the zone. The $555/MW-day figure here is the backstop procurement's proposed cap, and should not be conflated with the base auction it repairs — that auction was held to a $325/MW-day cap and its results report simulated it would have cleared at $554.72 without one. None of it is in force; FERC must approve the package, and the auction is scheduled to open barely two months after the filing.

PJM's board directed a filing at federal regulators that would, for the first time, treat large electricity users as a category to be counted, priced and switched off. Three pieces. A Large Load Registry would cover any site drawing 50 megawatts or more within a one-mile radius — an anti-fragmentation test — and require twelve categories of disclosure per site, including exact location, load quantity, ramp schedule and the megawatts and fuel type of backup generation; every megawatt not in service by 1 June 2027 counts as new. A one-time backstop procurement would buy the shortfall the auctions failed to fill, in fixed 15-year commitments bid between 30 September and 21 October 2026, open only to plant online by 2032. And an Interim Resource Adequacy Service — the renamed "connect and manage" — would require utilities to cut new large load, within ten minutes of instruction, before the grid deploys the emergency measures that reach ordinary customers. The rationing is narrower than it sounds: PJM allocates only zonal megawatt totals, never named customers, leaving states and utilities to choose who is cut; a data centre can satisfy the order by switching to its own generators rather than reducing compute; curtailed load is compensated at half the standard performance rate, paid by other customers in the zone; and the whole obligation lapses if it goes untriggered for three delivery years. On cost, the board wrote that PJM "does not have jurisdiction to allocate retail costs directly to individual data centers" and that "state action will be essential" — and its own procurement document sets out what happens if that state action does not arrive: absent a state framework, the backstop's costs default to all load in the zone, "including non-Large Loads," for the full 15-year term. None of it is in force. The whole package needs approval from federal regulators, and the procurement is scheduled to open barely two months after the filing. PJM projects new large-load demand in its territory to grow by about 70 gigawatts by 2038, against roughly 15 gigawatts of generation retired since 2022.