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The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on October 9 also rejected PJM’s “bring your own new capacity” mechanism, saying it had not justified a proposal to lock in the accreditation of resources over the lifetime of the contract.

PJM now is required by FERC to file tariff revisions by November 11.

The interconnection wanted its revisions approved by October 12 to prepare for the 2029-2030 base residual action to be conducted in December. FERC said most of PJM’s tariff revisions were to take effect on June 1.

FERC called PJM’s definition of a large load and a large load registry to be just and reasonable, but found a lack of justification for many aspects of the resource adequacy and bring your own new capacity plans.

A large load would be end-use customer load that has a cumulative peak load of 50 MW or greater at a single electrical site or all affiliated load facilities within a one-mile radius.

PJM also proposed a definition for a new large load that is an end-use customer going into service after June 1 or a load that is increased to a cumulative peak of 50 MW.

FERC found this definition reasonable, but severed and rejected it without prejudice, since it is part of the interim resource adequacy package.

The definition of a new large load is needed to describe the subset of large loads subject to curtailment where the load serving entity does not designate capacity to offset the load, a framework that FERC rejects.

The commission urged PJM, if it continues to pursue interim resource adequacy service, to address how its definition of a new large load would be tailored to protect existing commercial arrangements. This was a complaint of protestors in the docket.

The FERC order also approved a registry which will require load serving entities to provide information about large loads served to PJM, so that the interconnection can address their operational impacts on the transmission system.

The commission rejected the resource adequacy and bring your own new capacity plans because they “appear to present an impermissible intrusion on retail rate regulation” and are not subject to FERC authority in section 205 of the Federal Power Act.

This section says wholesale rates shall be just and reasonable.

PJM said the interim resource adequacy service was not discriminatory because it recognizes that new large loads are not similarly situated to other loads.

FERC said that PJM’s proposed tariff appears to place obligations directly on eligible new large loads, which are usually retail customers, and that a proposed compensation framework appears to establish a retail rate.

Another reason for rejecting the tariff was that some provisions appear to dictate which customers taking retail service will be curtailed, which is outside of FERC jurisdiction.

FERC also rejected the curtailment provisions of PJM’s interim resource adequacy plan. PJM proposes that new large loads can avoid curtailment by bringing their own new capacity.

FERC said the proposal does not lock in the accreditation of bring your own new capacity resources, and that the benefit of locking in does not outweigh PJM’s obligation to ensure that resource adequacy needs are met.

The commission’s order said that PJM has not produced evidence to demonstrate how retail customer characteristics are material to the resource adequacy challenges it seeks to address.

PJM has struggled for more than a year to respond to rapid demand growth from data centers and options to curtail their usage.

In its drive to spur artificial intelligence, the Trump Administration insists that data centers pay for their own generation sources and infrastructure upgrades, and has used FERC to insist that PJM’s tariff does not accommodate co-located loads.

These are end-users physically connected on the customer’s side of the interconnection to the PJM grid.

FERC said in a show cause order in March 2025 that behind the meter generation rules in PJM’s tariff are not just and reasonable because these loads are not fully accounted for in resource adequacy planning.

FERC told all of the nation’s central grid operators in June to justify or reform tariffs for data centers and other large energy users.

PJM has received most of the Trump Administration’s criticism. FERC Chair Laura Swet told the PJM annual meeting in May that the interconnection may have “grown too big to function.”

Two successive PJM capacity auctions in the past year both hit their price caps of more than $300/MW-day and still came up more than 6 GW short.

In December 2022, capacity went for less than $29/MW-day.

The May 2027 capacity auction will be the first with no price cap, said Abe Silverman, assistant research scholar at the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

“There is no way to separate data centers and affordability,” Silverman told about 200 people at the Maryland Clean Energy Summit last week. “We have no load growth in PJM, other than data centers. We are starting to see record increases in all components of the bill.”

Capacity prices get rolled into energy procurement costs of customer bills.

The trend has put power industry veterans on the defensive. Many of them insist that current capacity market rules were not meant to work with data center loads.

“We worked hard to add reliability and capacity, and FERC said generation is the responsibility of the states,” Jason Stanek, PJM’s executive director of governmental services, said at the Maryland event in College Park.

“FERC’s response to the PJM filing was that you cannot manage the reliability and financial aspects of data centers,” said Silverman, an attorney who has worked at FERC and for private energy interests.

“FERC told PJM that new adequate generation is not our problem,” he added. “We need a federal law that data centers do not get firm service until they bring their own generation. Unfortunately, we lack a federal partner.”

Tamla Olivier, CEO of energy distributor BGE, told the conference that large load developers often want a spot in the transmission connection queue without having supportive financial statements. “A lot of forecasted load will not come to fruition,” she said.