FERC Has a New Plan for Data Centers

Almost eight months have passed since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was tasked by the Trump administration with conjuring up with new rules to help speed up interconnection of large loads without increasing retail electricity costs. On Thursday, FERC finally responded with “major reforms,” in the words of Chair Laura Swett, putting the onus on America’s restructured electricity markets — PJM Interconnection, Midcontinent Independent System Operator, Southwest Power Pool, California Independent System Operator, ISO New England, and New York Independent System Operator — to figure out how to implement their suggested solutions.

Using what’s known as “show cause” orders, FERC presented those in charge of these electricity markets, known as regional transmission organizations and independent system operators, with what was essentially a menu of ideas that have been percolating in electricity policy circles since the rise of data-center-driven load growth has started putting pressure on the existing grid and told them to get to work. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright’s original “advance notice of proposed rulemaking,” published in late October, was more proscriptive and specific, whereas FERC essentially said to regional electricity markets, “do whatever you have to, just make it work.”

In a brief email, former FERC chair Neil Chatterjee described this as “a very FERC-y approach!” Or as Gretchen Kershaw, the chief operating officer of Grid Strategies and a former FERC legal advisor, explained to me that “it’s much faster to act on a region-specific basis instead of going through a full notice and comment rulemaking process.”

The commission’s proposed reforms fall into five categories:

1. The markets need “clear transmission service application and study rules” for large load customers seeking to connect to the grid, Swett said in her remarks. The commissioners specifically called out the use of “grid-enhancing technologies” to expand the capacity of America’s existing electricity infrastructure — things like reconductoring, which adds transmission capacity along existing wires, and dynamic line rating, which adjusts capacity based on local weather and conditions. “The cheapest transmission line is the one that already exists,” Commissioner David Rosner said, speaking after Swett at Thursday’s meeting.

2. The RTOs and ISOs will also have to show that they have “adequate safeguards against cost-shifting or take steps to create them,” Swett said. This will require “cost recovery agreements,” Rosner added, “which are designed to ensure that large loads pay their fair share of the costs incurred to serve them, regardless of whether the large load comes online as planned.” In other words, “If new infrastructure is built to accommodate a data center, and that data center doesn’t show up, residential customers are not left on the hook to pay the costs,” he said.

3. The third area that the electricity markets will have to address is co-location and behind-the-meter power, specifically coming up with rules that facilitate purpose-built generation facilities to support new large loads. This would allow data centers and big power users to be less of a burden on the grid, thus requiring less in the way of grid upgrades and additional costs that would be borne by all ratepayers.

4. The orders tells markets “to prove or develop new transmission services to reflect large load flexibility,” Swett said. Load flexibility is another idea designed to lower the system cost of data centers. Grids have to be built out to accommodate the peak demand of the system, but with flexibility, data centers could shave off how much power they demand during, say, a hot summer day, thus lowering that demand peak. To get there, however, they need to be properly incentivized. FERC is telling the RTOs and ISOs to come up with rules that would allow large loads to come online without necessarily requiring vast new buildouts of grid infrastructure and generation. “Legalizing flexible transmission service options for more large load customers can speed interconnection, avoid constructing unnecessary transmission upgrades, reduce strain on the grid, and make power bills cheaper for everyone,” Rosner said.

5. Finally, the orders will require the markets to come up with rules and procedures for generation that’s “proximate” to new load. This will encourage “bring your own new generation,” Rosner said. That stands in contrast to proposals requiring or encouraging new large sources of demand to place generation on their own premises. “Literal co-location is not the only way to facilitate faster, more efficient, and more cost-effective connections to the grid,” Rosner said.

The markets will have to come back in a month to explain how they “intend to ensure that adequate generation will be available to serve existing and new large loads,” a FERC staffer explained at Thursday’s meeting, then again a month later to explain either how their existing rules conform to the new requirements or how they plan to charge their rules to do so.

The commission’s decision is not a formal rulemaking. Instead, the commissioners argued that tasking each RTO and ISO with specific orders would result in a more tailored set of reforms. “Today we’re engaging those to act with more speed, more durability, and more precision than we would get with our proposed rulemaking,” Commissioner David LaCerte said.

The action was strikingly bipartisan, with Democratic and Republican commissioners approving it in a 5-0 vote. It also won plaudits from clean energy and environmental groups. The Sierra Club said in a statement the action was “responsive to Sierra Club’s requests on several fronts,” while the clean energy trade group Advanced Energy United lauded the orders as “potentially creating much-welcome regulatory certainty and transparency, as well as some safeguards to ensure that co-location won’t negatively impact the electric rates and system reliability of all other customers.”

Federal energy regulators have been mulling these reforms as the Trump administration and state and local government officials have grown increasingly restless with rising electricity prices, utilities, and data center developers. Swett herself has scolded America’s largest electricity market, PJM Interconnection, for its inability to meet its own preferred level of excess capacity to ensure it can maintain continuous service, as well as continual high capacity costs, which have translated into tens of billions of dollars of added costs for electricity customers in the mid-Atlantic. Swett has even gone so far to suggest that PJM “ simply has grown too big to function,” leading some market observers to speculate that a forced breakup may be nigh.

Electricity prices nationwide have risen 5.3% in the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while overall prices were up 4.2% — a number that includes gasoline price increases stemming from the war in Iran. In PJM territories like New Jersey, average bills have increased from about $91 to $140 over the past five years, while prices are up some 52%, according to the Heatmap-MIT Electricity Price Hub.

The existing rules, Swett said, are “unjust and unreasonable because they do not adequately address how to integrate large and co-located loads onto the transmission system.”

“Free-riding on other customers is not an option,” she added.