PJM filed its Expedited Interconnection Track (EIT) proposal February 27, 2026 in response to FERC Order EL25-49 (issued December 18, 2025) directing PJM to revise its Open Access Transmission Tariff to address co-located load and behind-the-meter generation arrangements. PJM requested the Commission issue an order on the EIT proposal by May 28, 2026 to enable a July 31, 2026 effective date. The EIT is intended to accelerate the interconnection of new generation specifically supporting co-located loads (hyperscaler data centers being the dominant use case). PJM's separate February 23 compliance filing covered substantial revisions to the BTM (Behind-The-Meter Generation) tariff sections governing how co-located generation arrangements are charged for grid services. As of March 31, 2026 there are 51 approved utility tariffs and service rules targeting large-load customers across the US, with 26 more proposed and awaiting regulatory approval across 36 states. Separately, OpenAI's Stargate has formally restructured: the original $500B fixed joint-venture announced in January 2025 has been replaced by bilateral agreements, with Oracle's 4.5 GW / $300B over 5 years anchoring the new structure; OpenAI has paused the UK Stargate site, decided not to expand the Abilene TX flagship, and reframed Stargate as a portfolio of compute commitments rather than a single JV-controlled asset class.
Primary source · FERC / PJM / Day Pitney / Digitimes ↗
Why it matters
Two macro updates. (1) The PJM EIT May 28 deadline is the PJM-side analog to ERCOT's TAC May 19-20 — both are last-stop governance decision points that lock the procedural rule set under which Cliff's submission-validator runs in each market. Cliff's product surface for PJM applicants currently models a 'standard' interconnection timeline; if EIT is approved on May 28 with July 31 effective, the product needs an additional 'EIT-eligible' classification check (does this site qualify for the expedited track) added to the validator before August 1. The criteria are reasonably bounded — co-located generation supporting an identified large load — but eligibility is a binary input that materially changes timeline math. (2) OpenAI's Stargate JV unwind is the first observable case where the hyperscaler-DC financing market structure shifted *back* from joint-venture toward bilateral. The original Stargate JV pooled risk across OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, MGX. The new structure pushes site-level risk back onto whichever counterparty signs each bilateral — Oracle holds 4.5 GW / $300B alone now. This matters for Cliff's competitive-landscape analysis on the financing layer (green-loan-data-center-financing.md, suggested two days ago) because it makes single-site debt structures (like Meta's $13B El Paso package) *more* important relative to JV equity, not less. The next $13M/MW debt anchor will land on a bilateral deal, not a JV, and Cliff customers underwriting individual site economics should be modeling counterparty-specific creditworthiness rather than JV-pooled credit. Also worth tracking: 'Stargate paused the UK site' is the second observable AI-DC site cancellation in a major OECD market this quarter (Microsoft's Aberdeen-area pullback being the first), suggesting hyperscalers are pruning marginal-return sites at the same time they're scaling top-tier US sites — barbell, not uniform expansion.
Related filings
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Plain-English version of what Abbott actually directed. On June 10, 2026 — twelve days before the Project Kilby announcement — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a formal directive letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT, the state utility regulator)...
Meta / Crusoe / 1.6 GW / Childress TX + Warrenton MO / Bloomberg-sourced / $600B Meta infra pledge
Plain-English version. Crusoe is a data center developer that originated in Bitcoin-flared-gas-to-compute and pivoted into AI-specific hyperscale campuses, most notably the Abilene Texas site that anchors a leg of the Stargate program. Meta is one of the four...
Data Center Dynamics — covering the original Bloomberg report ↗
PJM co-located load + BTMG / July 31 effective / 3 new transmission services
Plain-English framing. 'Co-located load' is the structure where a generator (a power plant) and a load (a data center) sit on the same site, behind the same point of interconnection, so the data center is electrically 'hidden' from the rest of the grid....
White & Case / FERC / Mayer Brown / PJM ↗