The Mess We Received

“The mess we received” is not how regulators usually talk. FERC Chairman Laura Swett wrote that her commission wouldn’t be “forced into accepting a deeply flawed, eleventh-hour procurement mechanism,” and PJM promptly delayed the reliability backstop auction that was supposed to start the next day. Cost allocation, transmission owner exit rules, collateral requirements: FERC said all of it may be unjust and unreasonable.

Look at the order of events. Last week the same commission was mocking a $1 letter of credit under a $20-billion data center. This week it’s rejecting a last-minute auction designed to buy power for those same data centers. A pattern is forming: the grid operator keeps showing up with an emergency, and the regulator keeps asking who is actually holding the bag. An emergency filed late enough leaves nobody time to read it. I suspect that’s a feature of the timing, whether or not anyone intended it.

Meanwhile, Ameren Missouri filed a twenty-year plan with 10.6 GW of gas, and Utility Dive’s data center piece says labor, equipment and local opposition are now snagging projects with big-tech names on them. So the demand story is wobbling at the edges while the supply response is being built as if it were certain. Gas turbines last forty years, and a forecast that is partly a wish doesn’t.

The quiet item is the one I’d actually bet on. The Utilize Coalition says we use roughly half of the grid’s capacity, and that a ten percent bump in utilization could save over $100 billion. Both the current and previous Energy Secretaries apparently like it. Nothing in energy gets that kind of agreement, so either it’s very good or nobody has priced it yet.