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Energy Secretary Chris Wright has gone on the record endorsing load flexibility — buried within his proposal to significantly expand federal regulatory authority over interconnection.
In an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, filed late Thursday, Wright directed the commission to expedite the interconnection of large loads that agree to be curtailable, as well as colocated facilities that are both curtailable and dispatchable.
This comes as a part of a broader ANOPR on potential reforms to standardize large load interconnection, especially for data centers to power artificial intelligence.
FERC has not historically had jurisdiction over large load interconnection. Wright, however, argues large loads that connect to the interstate transmission system are “squarely within the Commission’s jurisdiction” under the Federal Power Act — and furthermore that FERC’s taking on this authority is in the public interest.
In a letter attached to the notice, Wright couched the effort in the language of ensuring American prosperity. “Large loads, including AI data centers, served by public utilities must be able to connect to the transmission system in a timely, orderly, and non-discriminatory manner,” he wrote in his opening paragraph.
To standardize interconnection, Wright proposes 13 “principles” to govern FERC’s eventual rulemaking process. In addition to expediting the study process for flexible loads — potentially limiting it to just 60 days — these include:
- Requiring interconnecting loads to pay the full cost of network upgrades;
- Encouraging that load and hybrid facilities be studied alongside generation, to facilitate more efficient siting;
- Basing transmission service charges on withdrawal rights; and
- Maintaining a threshold of 20 megawatts to define “large load”;
As the ANOPR outlines, recent years have seen a growing number of commercial and industrial loads, and especially data centers, connecting to the transmission system. Forecasting just how fast those facilities will come online has presented a problem for system planning — and incentivized speculative, or “phantom,” data centers to flood the queue, mucking things up even further.
Investing in infrastructure for AI is top stated priority for the Trump administration. In his first week in office, the president announced the Stargate initiative, a $100 billion joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to finance and build the world’s largest data centers.
But that effort — as well as efforts to expand manufacturing or electrification — is limited by the grid’s capacity. Certain estimates suggest that trillions of dollars in new infrastructure will be needed to accommodate global load growth in the decades to come.
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There’s a growing push, however, to make better use of the existing grid, including by making loads flexible. A Duke University study published back in February, for example, found that the power system already has over 100 gigawatts of extra capacity, if only large loads like data centers adopt flexibility solutions.
In the months since, new companies like Emerald AI have emerged offering flexibility services similar to the demand response solutions that hyperscalers like Google have experimented with for years. Meanwhile, others like the startup Verrus are proposing redesigning data centers to better serve as flexible grid assets.
However, these flexibility moves have so far happened mostly on the margins. In a moment when getting interconnected is more competitive than ever, Tyler Norris, who authored the landmark Duke University paper, emphasized that encouraging flexibility is a good thing. Whether FERC has the authority to make that decision for the whole country, though, remains an open question.
“No matter where one stands on the jurisdictional debate, there should be broad agreement that every U.S. jurisdiction needs a viable, expedited service tier for large electricity customers willing to provide bounded flexibility to grid operators in exchange for faster interconnection,” Norris said Thursday.
The notice sets a deadline for action by FERC of April 30, 2026.
