This Week in Voltage
The federal government is moving on two fronts simultaneously, and the combined signal is hard to miss. The DOE is soliciting developers to co-locate data centers on federal lands — 16 sites with existing energy infrastructure and fast-tracked permitting, targeting operations by end of 2027. Meanwhile, FERC has given itself a June deadline to act on large-load interconnection reform, potentially directing who pays for multibillion-dollar grid upgrades. These aren't separate stories. They're the same story.
Deep Charge: The Grid Doesn't Know What Hit It
Here's the civilizational argument nobody is making clearly enough: data centers aren't just electricity consumers. They're the first infrastructure class in a century that is forcing the grid to modernize faster than regulators planned.
FERC Chair Laura Swett said it plainly at last week's Energy Bar Association conference — she's prepared to "push right up to the absolute edge of precedent" to get AI infrastructure onto the grid. That's not regulatory enthusiasm. That's an acknowledgment that the demand signal from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and the rest is so large and so fast that the existing interconnection queue — built for a slower world — is structurally inadequate.
The pattern suggests something bigger: when a single customer class can consume enough electricity to power cities the size of Indianapolis and New Orleans, it stops being a load problem and becomes a civilization infrastructure problem. The grid has to change shape around it.
That's what we're fighting for. Not just cheaper kilowatt-hours — a grid architecture capable of absorbing 10x, 100x the demand we're running today.
By the Numbers
- 16 DOE sites identified for potential AI data center co-location, with in-place energy infrastructure
- 5 GW of additional nuclear output targeted by 2029 through low-cost federal financing — explicitly to serve data center and manufacturing demand
- June 2026: FERC's self-imposed deadline to publish large-load interconnection reform
What We're Fighting For
Watch the June FERC ruling closely. If Swett's commission asserts federal jurisdiction over how data centers connect to the grid — and who pays for the upgrades — it will be the most consequential grid governance decision in a generation. The future belongs to civilizations that build infrastructure at the speed of ambition. We're about to find out if ours still can.