The ongoing large load interconnection proceeding at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has spurred a flood of filings that Halcyon co-founder and chief data officer Alex Klaessig described as the “comment event of the season” on a recent Latitude Dispatch. The 177-comment docket involves stakeholders from across the energy value chain, with nonprofit organizations (including trade associations), utilities, and developers making up the largest shares.
There’s broad agreement among tech giants and developers that FERC intervention is a necessary fix for the speed to power problem. Companies like Meta and Google filed comments arguing that standardized rules are critical for predictability and supporting a move toward greater federal oversight — as long as the rules are flexible enough to accommodate their specific needs.
But there’s a steep wall of opposition as well, from stakeholders who challenge the foundational question of whether FERC should be weighing in at all.
The loudest voices in opposition are state public utility commissions. In their filings, state regulators made the jurisdictional question their primary focus, emphasizing the need to preserve state jurisdiction over retail service, resource adequacy, siting, and the terms of retail interconnection.
“Many of these [state PUC comments] point out the fact that it would be impermissible…for FERC to be stepping in here,” Klaessig explained. He pointed specifically to comments from the California PUC, which argued that large loads factor into retail rates, and that PUCs can’t thoughtfully manage rate design if part of it is outside their control.
Just because a retail customer connects directly to the transmission system doesn’t make that transaction subject to FERC rules, the CPUC argued, adding that exerting jurisdiction into retail large-load energization would create confusion, overlap with state programs, slow down interconnections, and even harm grid reliability by disrupting existing coordination frameworks.
Instead, the CPUC argued, FERC should explicitly preserve states’ retail jurisdiction and avoid adopting any rules that override state tariffs or interconnection processes. The commission should coordinate with state regulators rather than impose new, federalized procedures, and should defer to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation when it comes to reliability reviews of large loads.
Another state filing that Klaessig pointed to was Georgia: “They talk about how they already have a lot of data centers, and it seems like they’re having no problem attracting other data centers,” he explained. “Because of that, they don’t see that there’s a problem and therefore FERC should kind of stay out.”
Like California, Georgia’s PUC also urges FERC to collaborate with states, and leans heavily on the argument that the Southeast’s utility structure is already doing the job. The commission points to Georgia’s vertically integrated framework, which allows regulators and utilities to plan and build new resources in tandem with large-load growth. Utilities there already have state-approved tariffs for customers with over 100 megawatts of load, which the commission says are designed to shield both the utility and ratepayers from stranded-cost and credit risks.
In Georgia’s view, FERC intervention would unnecessarily blur the line between wholesale and retail markets by pulling retail contract design and risk allocation into a federal transmission proceeding. A one-size-fits-all federal policy is the wrong tool, they argue, because Southeast states don’t operate organized wholesale markets and therefore manage large loads very differently from RTO regions.
FERC is now left to sift through the thousands of pages of filings, balancing the desire for standardization with the reality that any heavy-handed attempts to federalize the process will undoubtedly face a wall of lawsuits, Klaessig explained. “This is going to be the fine needle that FERC needs to thread: figuring out something that is within their jurisdiction, that is helpful, that doesn’t tread on already successful programs.”
