Forty-two thousand six hundred and twenty-five queue requests — and not one rule on the books to govern them. This is The Data Center Daily. Today: a live queue tracker finally puts a real-time number on the backlog, and the fifth law firm in five days is reading the same DOE letter. Matt's got questions about what's actually inside those entries. Yeah, big number. The fun part is what's hiding inside it. Let's start with the queue. One tap on follow, and we'll be back in your ears before you know it. Chris Talley at Interconnection.fyi is tracking it. Here's a number we haven't had all week: Interconnection.fyi is tracking 42,625 active queue requests across U.S. ISOs and utilities, updated daily. Drill into PJM, and it's 877 active requests, 102.79 gigawatts of load, generation, and transmission. Data last refreshed June 15. 102.79 gigawatts sitting in one region's queue. And each one of those entries got studied using whatever load basis the filer chose to put down. That's the piece the request count doesn't show you. 877 requests tells you how many, not how they were measured — gross draw versus net import is invisible in that number. Right. If you speed up the queue but don't fix how each request reports load, you're just moving the same bad math faster. You can clear 42,625 requests beautifully and still mis-size the grid. And some slice of that 42,625 is distribution-level load FERC can't even touch. We finally have a live scoreboard; we still don't have the rule to govern it. From K&L Gates:
The ANOPR is intended to provide a path forward to address the urgent electric power needs of large loads. Nevertheless, the rulemaking is going to be controversial. As DOE acknowledges, FERC has never before exercised authority over the interconnection of retail loads. Such a move will likely be viewed by some as an unacceptable encroachment on states’ historic authority.
K&L Gates is now the fifth firm in five episodes to read the same October 23 Wright letter to FERC. Five client alerts, one two-page directive, and still no NOPR on the table. And the deadline's already gone. Wright told FERC to take final action no later than April 30 — and it's mid-June. So what did 'consider an ANOPR' actually produce? Procedurally, the ask is pretty specific — retail loads over 20 megawatts connecting to jurisdictional transmission. That threshold captures basically every hyperscale campus in the queue. Right, but here's what none of these five firms gets into — gross load versus net import. You can study a 20-megawatt threshold all day. If you're measuring net draw, you're studying the wrong number on every single request. Got a tip, a correction, or a data center story we should be watching? Send it our way at datacenterdaily at lantern podcasts dot com. We read every note, and your feedback helps shape the show.
You'll find links to everything we covered today in the show notes, so if a particular item is worth a closer read, that's the place to start.
That's The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.