The largest US grid's emergency power plan for data centers is frozen until February

On 29 September the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruled on PJM Interconnection's plan to close a power shortfall, and the answer was: not yet. FERC accepted PJM's Reliability Backstop Procurement but suspended it for five months, with an effective date of 28 February 2027. PJM said it would not run the procurement it had planned to open on 30 September.

What the procurement was for. PJM runs the largest grid in the United States, covering 13 states and Washington, DC, including the Northern Virginia data center cluster. Its capacity auctions for the 2028/29 delivery year came up short, and the backstop was a one-time step to sign new supply to close the gap. The target is roughly 6.8 gigawatts of unforced capacity, reduced by any deals that large power users have already signed with new generators. Utility Dive describes the shortage as largely driven by data center demand forecasts.

What FERC objected to. The commission found three parts of the plan may be unjust and unreasonable. The first is who pays: PJM proposed to set each area's share of costs from a snapshot of current load, which FERC said would not capture forecast growth from large new users. The second is the rules for transmission owners leaving the arrangement. The third is collateral: PJM wanted security for half of the estimated contract value, and FERC said PJM had not shown a reasonable basis for it.

FERC Chairman Laura Swett was blunt. "This commission will not be forced into accepting a deeply flawed, eleventh-hour procurement mechanism with billion-dollar implications for consumers," she said, according to Utility Dive. PJM said it is reviewing the order and intends to work quickly to address the commission's remaining concerns.

Why we file it. One of the nine conditions we track is compute and power: whether announced gigawatts become powered gigawatts. The usual bottlenecks are turbines, transformers, permits and interconnection queues. This is a different one: the market process for paying for new supply. Data centers can sign leases and order chips years ahead. Somebody still has to contract for the generation that will run them, and agree who pays for it. In the region with the most data center load, the central route for that just slipped by up to five months, by an official order. That is a roadblock for the power condition, and a regulatory action that slows grid supply for large loads.

The other side of the same week. The bilateral route is still open, and it moved. On 30 September, the day after the order, Constellation and Amazon announced a 20-year agreement for 690 megawatts from the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland. It includes an uprate of about 190 megawatts of new capacity coming online between 2030 and 2032 and more than $3 billion of investment, plus a retail supply agreement for Amazon operations across the 13-state PJM market. Large users with balance sheets can still sign for power directly. The backstop exists for the rest of the gap.

How we read it. We file this as meaningful, not major. FERC did not reject the plan, it accepted it in part and set a date. PJM can shorten the delay by filing fixes. No data center project has been reported delayed because of this order, and the 6.8 gigawatts is a procurement target for 2028/29, not capacity that has been lost. So the energy and grid layer stays amber, where earlier state actions in California and Maryland and Oracle's force majeure notice on Project Jupiter had already put it. The data center layer stays red. The compute and power tracker, already at risk, gains another official data point.

A correction to our own process. This order came out on 29 September. Our earlier runs that week did not file it. We are filing it now, dated to the order, because a federal grid decision of this size belongs on the map whether or not we caught it on the day.

What would change this. PJM refiling with fixes and FERC letting the procurement start before 28 February would ease it. A further delay, a rejection, or named data center projects slowed because supply was not contracted would make it worse. So would state regulators deciding to put the costs on households rather than on the large users driving the demand.