A group of US lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter this week asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to block the roughly $33.4 billion sale of power company AES to a consortium led by BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT, arguing the deal fails FERC's public-interest standard and could raise bills to benefit data centers at ratepayers' expense (Reuters). AES has pushed back, saying no transaction costs will be passed on to customers in its regulated Indiana and Ohio utilities (Reuters). The deal, agreed back in March, is one of the largest power sector transactions in recent memory and is targeted to close in 2026 or 2027 (Reuters).
Here's what the ratepayer-protection framing leaves out: $33 billion of private capital wants into the US utility sector specifically because it expects electricity demand to keep climbing. That is the correct read. Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT are not buying AES because they're nostalgic for coal plants — they're buying exposure to the data center buildout that's straining grids from Virginia to Ohio. Blocking the deal doesn't make that demand go away. It just slows down the capital that could help meet it.
The Real Risk Isn't Private Equity, It's Slow Capital Deployment
I've been tracking PJM's struggles all year — FERC rejected the grid operator's initial data-center power plan as "deeply flawed" in late September, forcing a rewrite and prompting PJM itself to suspend a planned capacity auction (Bloomberg) (Bloomberg). TD Cowen analysts called the move a "punt" on policy that the grid desperately needs resolved. That's the actual bottleneck: regulatory indecision, not private capital showing up with a checkbook. A grid starved for investment should want more entities willing to write nine-figure checks into generation and transmission, not fewer.
The lawmakers' letter treats private equity ownership of utilities as inherently suspicious. I'd argue the opposite concern is more urgent: every month FERC spends litigating deal structure is a month PJM isn't building the interconnection capacity that data centers, and eventually everyone else on the grid, need. Electric vehicle adoption globally keeps climbing according to IEA tracking (IEA), and that demand curve doesn't wait for utility ownership disputes to resolve.
Watch what FERC Chair Laura Swett does with this filing in the coming weeks. If the AES deal gets strung out past its 2026-2027 closing target over ownership-structure objections rather than genuine rate protections, that's a signal the agency is more comfortable blocking capital than directing it.