A regulator with teeth, finally
FERC chair Laura Swett described the action as historic, and for once the label fits. The show-cause orders to PJM, MISO, SPP, CAISO, NYISO and ISO-NE are unusually prescriptive. As Rob Gramlich of Grid Strategies told the FT, FERC typically says “here’s an important thing to do, please consider it,” and utilities treat it as a check-the-box exercise. Not this time. The regulator named five specific issues the grid operators must address: faster interconnection studies, protections against shifting data center costs onto other customers, treatment of data centers that build or contract their own power, flexibility options for large loads, and rules for power plants built to serve nearby data centers.
Read that list again. Two of the five items concern dedicated and co-located generation. The regulator overseeing the country’s largest wholesale markets is now writing rules around data centers that bring their own power. That is not a footnote. It is an acknowledgment of where the market has already gone.
What the order cannot fix
The FT’s reporting is equally clear-eyed about the limits, and we agree with every one of them. The average time to connect a data center to the grid now exceeds four years, according to JLL. The 60-day clock starts a process, not a result: compliance filings, comment periods, revised tariffs, and the litigation that follows all sit between this order and a single electron reaching a rack. One-third of US electricity customers live outside the six grid operators’ territories entirely, so the order never reaches them. And because FERC deliberately stayed clear of state jurisdiction, the state-level large load tariffs Gramlich calls “leaky and weak” remain exactly that.
Former FERC commissioner Allison Clements credits the order with opening what “to date has been a black box” of interconnection costs. She is right. But transparency into a four-year queue is still a four-year queue. In the best case, the most prescriptive FERC action in years produces regional rule changes two or three years from now, covering two-thirds of customers, with the underlying cost structures untouched.
The gap is measured in years
This is the gap Next Century-Power was built for. We do not shorten the interconnection queue. We remove it. Our dedicated, on-site gas turbine microgrids deliver 1GW+ of islanded, single-tenant power on timelines the grid cannot approach, with a four-nines uptime target and built-in redundancy. From there, our 1.2GW pods of four integrated 300MW small modular reactors provide durable, cost-stable power for the decades that follow, while on-site carbon capture converts emissions into high-value 2D materials rather than trading them away.
Notice what disappears under that model. The cost-shifting question FERC is wrestling with does not arise, because islanded, single-tenant generation shares no grid and shifts no costs onto ratepayers. The jurisdictional tangle the FT describes, where a single Virginia data center answers to Dominion, the State Corporation Commission, the state legislature and PJM at once, collapses to a single bilateral relationship. FERC’s fifth question, how to handle plants built to serve nearby data centers, is one we answered by design.
FERC’s order deserves the credit the FT gives it. It is also an official admission that the grid, as governed today, cannot keep pace with the load coming at it. When the regulator’s strongest available tool is a 60-day deadline for paperwork, operators who need a gigawatt online in 2028 already know their plan cannot be waiting.
Source: “FERC’s data centre ultimatum,” Energy Source newsletter, Financial Times (Martha Muir), July 2026.
