FERC Rejects PJM’s Plan to Curtail New Data Centers First

On October 9, 2026 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order in Docket No. ER26-3515-000, reported at 197 FERC ¶ 61,019, on the large load package PJM Interconnection, L.L.C. filed on August 13. PJM had asked for six things: a definition of Large Load, a Large Load Registry, Interim Resource Adequacy Service, a requirement that load serving entities serving New Large Load designate new capacity at least equal to that load’s peak, rules for Bring Your Own New Capacity arrangements, and an exclusion of Eligible New Large Load from the capacity demand curve starting with the 2029/2030 Delivery Year. The Commission accepted the first two, effective October 12, 2026 as PJM requested, and directed a compliance filing within 30 days. It rejected the other four, and it also severed and rejected, without prejudice, PJM’s separate definition of New Large Load, the term that would have marked which loads could be curtailed. The accepted definition is the one this desk described on September 7: end-use customer load with a cumulative peak of 50 megawatts or more at a single electrical site, with all affiliated load facilities within a one-mile radius treated as one site. The Commission rejected protests that the threshold should be higher, limited to data centers, or should spare legacy facilities near new ones, and left the method for measuring the mile to PJM’s manuals.

The order gives three reasons for the rejection. First, jurisdiction. The Federal Power Act leaves retail sales to the states, and the Commission found that the proposed tariff language appeared to place obligations directly on Eligible New Large Loads, which it said are for the most part retail customers, appeared to dictate which retail customers would be curtailed, and appeared to set a retail rate through the compensation it directed to those customers. The Commission said PJM’s transmittal letter described a narrower design that might have been within its authority, but that the tariff text did not match it, and that PJM’s answer did not engage with the gap. Second, discrimination: PJM had not produced sufficiently detailed evidence for treating load serving entities differently based on the characteristics of their retail customers, when its capacity market has historically procured for all network load alike. Third, the exemption itself: the Commission found PJM had not justified locking in a Bring Your Own New Capacity resource’s capacity accreditation for the life of the arrangement, and said the lock-in could leave the region short if a resource’s real contribution fell. Because the remaining pieces were, in its words, inextricably linked, it rejected them as a package. Commissioner David Rosner concurred, writing that a refiled plan must justify curtailing this load on a mandatory basis ahead of customers who volunteered for demand response, and that “homes, hospitals, and schools should never be curtailed before data centers.”

The rejection removes terms that were never in force. The registry is in force now. Under the accepted design, the load serving entity for each Large Load must submit or cause to be submitted the Eligible Customer, a description of the load, its location, the in-service date of each increment, any peak shaving adjustment, the delivery point, the peak load quantity and ramp schedule, telemetry specifications, backup generation including fuel type and permitting limitations, contracts or service agreements between the load and the load serving entity, and contacts at the transmission owner, the electric distributor and the load serving entity. The Commission expects PJM to drop items that belonged to the rejected package, such as the amount of new capacity a load brought. The information is shared with state commissions, transmission owners, electric distributors, load serving entities, the market monitor and the Commission under PJM’s existing confidentiality rules, and PJM will publish only aggregated data. State consumer advocates do not get access under those rules, and the Commission declined to widen it. Industrial customers stay in the registry, but the order says only for informational purposes, since the curtailment service they objected to is gone.

The practical point for a data center owner, a powered land seller or a manufacturer near the 50 megawatt line is that a third party is now describing the site to the grid operator, and the owner may not see what was filed. The registry is how PJM forecasts load and plans transmission, so a ramp schedule entered loosely becomes a planning input. Two facts from the same week show why the grid side matters to real estate. On September 29 the Commission accepted PJM’s companion Reliability Backstop Procurement in Docket ER26-3380-000 but suspended it for five months, to an effective date of February 28, 2027, subject to refund and a paper hearing, and PJM said the procurement would not open on September 30 as planned and that timing is to be determined. And on October 13 and 14, with about 61,000 megawatts of generation out for maintenance by PJM’s count, PJM issued a Maximum Generation Alert and Pre-Emergency Load Management Actions, and said a Department of Energy emergency order allows it to direct data centers and other Large Loads onto backup generation if necessary. PSV did not read that Department of Energy order and reports its scope only as PJM describes it.

The register this desk proposed on September 7, one row per site a firm owns or is chasing in PJM, needs a revision rather than a rebuild. Inputs are the October 9 order, PJM’s compliance filing when it arrives, the September 29 backstop order, PJM’s operations notices, and the firm’s own site list with measured and forecast peak load. Columns that tracked the rejected terms (the ten-year price-taker obligation, the transferability rule, the March 1, 2027 proof deadline) are marked rejected with the order citation, not deleted, because a refiling may bring some of them back. New columns follow the registry: whether the site is a Large Load under the accepted definition including affiliated facilities within a mile, who the load serving entity is, the owner’s own version of each registry field, the date the owner confirmed the utility’s submission matches it, and any capacity or supply contract signed with the old rules in mind. The output is a short list per site of registry fields that differ between the owner’s records and what the utility reports.

The reviewer is whoever owns the utility relationship for the site, with counsel on any contract that references the rejected service by name. The approval gate is that no load quantity or ramp schedule goes to a utility for registry purposes until a named person signs the row, because those are the numbers PJM will plan against. An assistant does the volume work well: extracting the order’s accepted and rejected items into cells, diffing PJM’s compliance filing against the order, watching the docket for a refiling or rehearing request, and flagging contracts that mention the rejected terms. It should not decide whether a contract’s conditions are triggered by a rejection, should not treat Commission guidance on a possible refiling as a rule, and should not estimate what a refiled plan will say. PSV ran no model on this order, tested no product, and promises no cost, schedule, reliability or approval outcome.