The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued six show-cause orders on June 18, 2026, directing regional grid operators PJM, MISO, Southwest Power Pool, CAISO, ISO New England and NYISO to justify within 60 days why their existing tariff structures can accommodate the surge in data center electricity demand, or to propose reforms. The orders also require each grid operator to submit a reliability report within 30 days detailing how it plans to secure enough generation capacity for large new loads.
The action follows a 2025 request from Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright asking regulators to accelerate grid interconnection timelines for large-load energy users, particularly AI data centers, which currently can take years to connect to the transmission grid. FERC's stated goal is to compress that process toward a 90-day target for handling new interconnection requests.
U.S. data center electricity demand has grown from roughly 23 gigawatts in 2023 to about 42 gigawatts in 2026, with forecasts putting demand near 66 gigawatts by 2027. In March 2026, seven major AI and cloud companies, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI, signed a White House-facilitated Ratepayer Protection Pledge committing to directly fund grid infrastructure improvements tied to their data center projects rather than passing those costs to other electricity customers.
Grid operators face equipment supply constraints as they respond, with standard power transformers now averaging 128-week lead times industrywide.
Source: Data Center Knowledge - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/build-design/ferc-targets-grid-rules-for-data-centers-and-large-loads