FERC just stopped asking how PJM vets big loads and started asking who runs PJM at all. If you're just catching up: PJM's AI-load problem has already moved beyond forecast risk and into market design. The market monitor says data centers account for 6.3 billion dollars — 38 percent — of the latest capacity-auction charges. PJM's moving ahead with its CIFP-LLA framework, while Monitoring Analytics keeps pushing generation-backed large loads or a separate backstop mechanism to cover them. This is The Data Center Daily. Today, FERC takes on PJM governance. We've also got OpenAI's 20-billion-dollar Georgia build and Ohio quietly scrapping a rule. Stick around — the receipts are ugly. Start with FERC and who actually controls the grid. We're staying on PJM large-load integration plan — follow the show and you won't miss what comes next. From Laila Kearney at 95.7 KELO-FM:
NEW YORK, July 23 (Reuters) – U.S. energy officials questioned PJM Interconnection’s power structure on Thursday as regulators weigh reforms to the country’s largest power grid, which faces the growing risk of blackouts as data center demand soars and little new electricity supply is added.
FERC held a technical conference Thursday, and the focus went straight to PJM's governance: should the board of managers be more independent of the utilities and power producers that vote on the rules? That's a different animal from the show-cause orders we've been tracking. Those focused on how PJM vets large loads. Now FERC's asking who actually runs the grid buckling under them. Right — you've got a multilayered vote where transmission owners and plant operators help set the rules, then the board rubber-stamps them at the end. That's the accountability black hole the senators were poking at Monday, except now FERC's naming the target out loud. And it's not rhetorical anymore. PJM's got something like twelve gigawatts of large load in the queue, on a grid serving 67 million people and the world's densest pile of data centers. Make the board more independent, and you're changing the body that decides what clears. So put the question there. The catch is, if FERC restructures PJM's governance, it also has to say who's accountable for the ratepayer bill that follows. We'll get to that dollar figure later this hour. Yeah, because a reformed board that still greenlights the same trend line is just the old rubber stamp with a fresh org chart. Marshall Benveniste, writing in ConstructConnect:
OpenAI said it will invest $20 billion to launch Project Camellia in Effingham County, Ga., making the site one of the largest AI infrastructure projects now moving toward development in the Southeast. The project’s 3.2-gigawatt power requirement, to be delivered in phases from 2028 to 2032, points to a multi-year construction cycle tied as much to grid and utility work as to the data center buildings themselves.
The Georgia numbers haven't changed since we led with them — twenty billion, 3.2 gigawatts into Effingham County, phased from 2028 through 2032. The new piece is the role OpenAI's taking on: lead designer and developer. At this scale, it's the first time OpenAI's building its own compute instead of leasing it. And it comes the same week the Journal put OpenAI's spending through 2030 at around $750 billion, up from $600 billion earlier this year. Lead designer and developer sounds great until you ask who eats the grid work. Georgia Power's handling the utility buildout for a 3.2-gigawatt ramp, and that ramp runs to 2032. I want this on the record: if OpenAI flexes load in the first hot August, who backstops the capacity Georgia Power already priced in? It's the same accountability fight FERC just opened around PJM, playing out in a different state. Here's Marin Holt at MGRID:
Data centers accounted for $6.3 billion, or 38%, of the $16.4 billion in charges from PJM Interconnection’s most recent capacity auction, Joseph Bowring, president of the grid operator’s independent market monitor, said in an email to Utility Dive reported on July 20, 2026, as PJM prepares to file a capacity backstop proposal with federal regulators.
Now we have the per-auction breakdown. Bowring's monitor puts data centers at $6.3 billion of the latest $16.4 billion capacity auction — 38%. And 38% is the low read. Across four auctions, data centers account for $29.4 billion out of $63.6 billion — 46%. So the latest number is a dip. A dip, and one customer class is still eating almost half of what the whole region paid to keep the lights on. Tie that back to the FERC piece we just hit — regulators questioning who actually runs PJM. If FERC reforms the board, does that $6.3 billion line bend, or does a shiny new board rubber-stamp it too? PJM's also filing a capacity backstop proposal. The stakeholder version calls for an auction covering roughly 6.8 gigawatts as soon as September, with a $555-per-MW-day cost cap. A cap on the thing that already accounts for 46% of the bill. I'll believe in the cap when I see who's on the hook if it breaks. From Jess Huff at The Texas Tribune:
A controversial data center project in East Texas is no longer moving forward after the company said it wouldn’t be able to comply with Gov. Greg Abbott’s development standards. Kansas-based Diode Ventures had proposed building a data center in Henderson County near Cedar Creek Reservoir, a historic waterway in a community heavily involved in water conservation.
Diode Ventures is out of Henderson County. The East Texas project is officially withdrawn. The company's stated reason: it couldn't meet Abbott's development standards. Five million gallons of lake water a day by year five, pulled from Cedar Creek Reservoir for a site in a subdivision, in a community heavily involved in water conservation. That's damn near two billion gallons a year from a lake that's already running low. And it'd take a twelve-year buildout to get there. The withdrawal leaves the water question hanging. The standards worked as a filter here. A Kansas outfit looked at Abbott's rules, did the lake math, and walked. Compare that with PJM: sometimes the check comes from a governance board; sometimes it's a country road full of homeowners who read the withdrawal permit. Here's Farm and Dairy:
SALEM, Ohio — The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency scrapped a proposed statewide general permit on July 21 that would’ve allowed data centers to discharge wastewater into local waterways. The agency dismissed the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System general permit “after carefully reviewing the significant volume of public comments received on the draft” — over 7,000.
Ohio EPA killed the general discharge permit on Monday — the statewide shortcut that would've let data centers dump wastewater without measuring chemicals before discharge and with only a single public comment window. It's dead. Seven thousand comments will do that. We flagged individual NPDES permits as the path on Tuesday, and now the agency has closed the door on the blanket version. No chemical testing before it hits the waterway, one public hearing for every data center that ever gets built? Yeah, no — glad that one's in the ground. And look at this week: Ohio EPA won't rubber-stamp discharge, and FERC's questioning who even runs PJM. Both are making somebody prove the case project by project. If you follow the infrastructure powering AI, check out Anthropic Pentagon Watch, a daily briefing on Anthropic’s fight with the DoD over Claude, military AI use, autonomous weapons, and procurement blacklisting. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Next, we're watching PJM’s capacity backstop proposal, a concrete market-design checkpoint with about 6.8 gigawatts potentially in scope as soon as September 2026.
You’ll find links to every story in today’s show notes if you want to spend more time with any of them.
That’s The Data Center Daily for this Friday. This is a Lantern Podcast.