Sarah: The same grid scarcity that just stuck PJM ratepayers with billions is now a thousand-dollar retail pitch.
Sarah: Buy the moat, apparently.
Sarah: This is The Data Center Daily.
Sarah: Today: a REIT story putting a price on the scarcity we've watched build all week
Sarah: and a step-back on PJM's large-load plan — twelve proposals went into the Board's call
Sarah: and only one came out.
Sarah: Here's AOL:
Quote: Real estate investment trusts (REITs) have staged a comeback in 2026 after years of declining or moving sideways.
Quote: And one category of REITs, data centers, is particularly hot right now.
Matt: So this is where the week lands.
Matt: The same scarcity that's sticking PJM ratepayers with thirty billion in grid costs just got packaged as a personal-finance headline.
Matt: Put your thousand bucks in, folks.
Sarah: Realty Income upping its data center exposure — that's the real signal under the retail framing.
Sarah: The moat is an energized interconnect, and capital markets are pricing it like vacancy is under one percent.
Matt: Right. Virginia's trying to bill data centers for grid costs
Matt: Bastrop's handing a decade of tax abatements to an unnamed tenant
Matt: and AOL's telling grandma to buy in before the invoice clears.
Matt: Somehow, the ratepayer is the one person no one's answering for.
Sarah: I'll give the asset logic one sentence: when the operators are selling majority stakes and the REITs are buying
Sarah: the smart money has decided the scarcity is durable and someone else eats the cost shift.
Matt: That's the tell, Sarah.
Matt: Institutional and retail capital are flowing in at the exact moment the bill's being written.
Matt: Somebody saw the timing and said — sell it now.
Matt: Everybody's calling PJM's large-load integration plan a reliability milestone.
Matt: But we've heard queue reform before, and the backlog kept growing.
Matt: So what's different this time — and if it sticks, who gains leverage and who loses it?
Sarah: The design matters more than the headline.
Sarah: PJM's Board announced this in January — formally
Sarah: CIFP-LLA — after an accelerated stakeholder process that produced twelve competing proposals.
Sarah: The Board didn't just pick one sponsor's plan.
Sarah: It borrowed from several, which at least tells you they're trying to build something broad enough to survive FERC review.
Sarah: RMI's May analysis put the pressure in plain numbers: the PJM region has roughly 30 gigawatts of new load trying to connect by 2030
Sarah: one of the fastest-growing demand zones in the country.
Sarah: The new part is what PJM did at the same time.
Sarah: Utility Dive reported the day before the Board announcement that PJM had trimmed its near-term load forecast because of stricter data center
Sarah: vetting criteria. So they're already deciding what counts as firm demand, not just promising a cleaner queue.
Sarah: Then FERC turned up the heat in June with show-cause orders to PJM and five other grid operators
Sarah: giving them 60 days to defend or rewrite their large-load tariff rules.
Sarah: The test is pretty simple: do the vetting rules come with financial teeth — deposits
Sarah: milestone payments curtailment obligations — and actually gate interconnection milestones?
Sarah: Or do they just reshuffle queue positions while cost allocation and study sequencing stay basically the same?
Matt: So if PJM's vetting is already trimming the demand forecast
Matt: does that hand an advantage to hyperscalers with shovel-ready sites and creditworthy load profiles
Matt: or does everyone get squeezed the same way?
Sarah: Not equally. It almost certainly separates the field.
Sarah: If you're a hyperscaler and you can post the bigger financial commitments
Sarah: show a firm operating load shape
Sarah: and coordinate with the utility on behind-the-meter or co-located generation
Sarah: you're the customer these stricter screens favor.
Sarah: PJM's market monitor said in June that the tight supply-demand balance
Sarah: plus elevated capacity auction prices
Sarah: is already pushing negotiating power toward customers who can de-risk interconnection for the utility.
Sarah: The wildcard is still at the state level.
Sarah: RMI flags that PJM's thirteen member states keep a lot of room on cost allocation and siting approvals.
Sarah: So states that move fast on permitting and cut direct infrastructure cost-sharing deals with large loads can still pull campuses away from
Sarah: states that don't no matter what the queue reform says on paper.
Host: If The Data Center Daily helps you keep up with the week, take a second to subscribe wherever you're listening.
Host: And if you can leave a quick review, that helps other people find the show too.
Host: We'll be watching the FERC show-cause response window for PJM and five other grid operators on large-load tariff rules.
Host: If you want to dig further into anything we covered today, links to every story are in the show notes.
Host: Follow whichever ones caught your ear.
Host: That's The Data Center Daily for today.
Host: This is a Lantern Podcast.