Six Grids Called Out
On June 18, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), under Section 206 of the Federal Power Act, issued "show cause" orders to all six regional grid operators—PJM, MISO, the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), California's CAISO, New England's ISO-NE, and New York's NYISO. The demand is firm: each must, within 60 days, either prove that its current large-user interconnection rules are still "just and reasonable" or submit a reform proposal outright; and within 30 days, file a report explaining how it will ensure enough generation to supply these new large loads. FERC chief Laura Swett called it a "national priority," and this approach bypasses the usual legislative process that normally drags on for years.
Why AI Forced It
On the surface this order is about the grid, but its root is AI. Data centers with power draws of hundreds of megawatts are queued up waiting to connect, while the existing interconnection process is slow and the allocation of costs remains unsorted. What FERC wants to solve this time is exactly the queue and the allocation: how to speed up approvals, how to prevent costs from being passed on to ordinary users, and how to accommodate new models like "self-supplied generation nearby." In the end, the compute race has long been about more than chips—it's also about electricity. Push the story of model training and inference one layer back, and the real chokepoint is whether the grid can, and is willing to, free up capacity for these large loads. How each grid ends up reforming, and who foots the bill for electricity, is worth continuing to watch.