Plain-English framing: in the U.S. grid, FERC (the federal regulator) governs interstate transmission, while individual state commissions govern local distribution and retail service. Data centers are so large that they blur the line — a single campus can need a connection big enough to look like an interstate transmission question, which is normally FERC's turf, even though siting and land use are local. The DOE (an executive-branch department, more aligned with 'build faster') has been pressing FERC to speed up large-load interconnection. State regulators (via NARUC) pushed back on the jurisdictional grab. FERC didn't rule on the merits by its April 30 deadline; it issued a procedural order saying it intends to act by end of June. So late June is the date to watch for a federal framework. At the opposite pole, an environmental coalition wants Congress to pause data centers nationally. That is very unlikely to pass, but it signals the federal politics are now bidirectional — one branch pushing to accelerate, an advocacy bloc pushing to halt. Sources: Utility Dive 'DOE large load interconnection proposal sparks federal-state jurisdiction concerns'; White & Case 'DOE directs FERC to accelerate interconnection of data centers'; American Bar Association 'The Jurisdictional Collision over Large Loads and Data Center Interconnection' (Spring 2026); Engineering News-Record 'Energy Sector Debates New US Rules to Power Up More Large Load Data Centers'.
Primary source · Utility Dive / White & Case / American Bar Association / ENR ↗
Why it matters
This is the federal bookend to the local moratorium story above: localities are pausing, while the federal executive is trying to accelerate — and they will collide on real sites. For Cliff, the end-of-June FERC framework is a second top-tier federal docket to track alongside the PJM co-location proceeding (EL25-49), and it is broader because it potentially touches every RTO, not just PJM. The jurisdictional angle is the part to model: if FERC asserts authority over large-load interconnection terms, a project's connection rules get standardized federally; if states retain it, the rules stay a 50-jurisdiction patchwork that is exactly the complexity Cliff's knowledge graph is built to navigate. Either outcome increases the value of a single product that maps 'who has authority over this specific connection.' Add the DOE/FERC large-load proceeding to the live-docket watchlist with a hard date checkpoint at end of June.
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