This Week in Voltage
On April 16, FERC issued an order that should be front-page news for anyone who cares about the future of American electricity. The commission set a hard June 2026 deadline to rewrite the rules governing how large power users — defined as loads above 20 MW, which describes basically every serious AI data center — connect to the transmission grid. After reviewing more than 3,500 pages of public comments and coordinating with DOE, FERC says it will act "in a manner that is quick, efficient, and legally durable."
Quick and legally durable. From a federal regulator. I'll believe it when I see it — but the urgency is real, and the stakes are enormous.
The demand pressure driving this rulemaking is not hypothetical. AI data centers consumed 20 GW of electricity in Q1 2026, up roughly 50% year-over-year, with Goldman Sachs projecting 35 GW total demand by year-end. Individual campuses are pulling over 100 MW each. The grid interconnection queue was not built for this. FERC knows it. June is when they have to prove they can fix it.
Deep Charge: The Bottleneck Is the Rulebook, Not the Wire
FERC's June rulemaking, combined with DOE's push to co-locate data centers on federal lands with fast-tracked permitting — including 16 identified sites with existing energy infrastructure — represents a genuine attempt to cut through that procedural fog. New York is moving to select a site for at least 1 GW of new nuclear capacity this year. The pieces are assembling.
The civilizational math here is straightforward: you cannot build an AI-powered economy on a grid governed by 1990s interconnection logic. Every month of delay in FERC's rulemaking is another month that data center developers are making siting decisions around regulatory uncertainty rather than physics. That's wasted potential at civilizational scale.
Watch June. If FERC delivers a durable large-load interconnection framework, it unlocks a decade of infrastructure investment. If it punts, the bottleneck hardens.
By the Numbers
- 20 GW — AI data center electricity demand in Q1 2026, per EIA data
- 35 GW — Goldman Sachs projected AI demand by end of 2026
- 16 — DOE-identified federal sites eligible for fast-tracked data center and energy co-location
- June 2026 — FERC's self-imposed deadline to rewrite large-load interconnection rules
What We're Fighting For
Every gigawatt of stranded AI capacity — sitting idle because an interconnection queue is clogged — is a tax on the future. FERC's June decision won't build a single power plant. But it will determine whether the next thousand get built on a timeline that matters. This is what regulatory reform actually looks like when the stakes are civilizational: not glamorous, not cinematic, just a commission meeting in June that either opens the floodgates or doesn't.
The future is electric. The question is whether the paperwork catches up in time.