A governor’s audit letter just put ERCOT’s own large-load deadline on ice. Here’s how we got here: PJM’s fast-rising data-center load has exposed fights over capacity-market costs, reliability backstops, and who gets a say in the rules. PJM has already opened a temporary Expedited Interconnection Track for qualifying large-capacity resources while it pursues broader backstop procurement and interim resource-adequacy work. The dispute runs through market design, affordability, governance, and federal oversight. This is The Data Center Daily. Texas just hit the brakes, Maryland lost a giant campus, and regulators are finally getting a close look at how all this load behaves when the grid hiccups. If this story matters to you — PJM large-load integration plan — hit follow. We'll be back on it soon. Here's Jessica Soos at Mondaq:
Gov. Abbott sent a public letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) yesterday directing the PUC and ERCOT to conduct comprehensive audits of all data centers prior to approving interconnection to the ERCOT grid.
ERCOT says it’ll miss the PUC-set August 7 Batch Zero classification deadline after Abbott ordered audits of every data center seeking grid interconnection. Now ERCOT needs the PUC to grant its good-cause exception request. So every developer in Batch Zero gets to wait while the state audits it. If you were counting on a Texas power path this year, the governor just put it behind a new checkpoint. And the distinction matters: Batch Zero was already the formal large-load study process. Abbott’s directive adds an audit gate outside that process, and now ERCOT needs permission to move its deadline. Efficient, in the way of a tollbooth appearing halfway down the highway. Good. Audit the megawatts people are claiming. But somebody needs to say who eats the delay—developers, transmission customers, or ratepayers handed a giant speculative-buildout bill. The Southern Maryland Chronicle writes:
Amazon Web Services has formally withdrawn its application to build a massive data center campus near the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Lusby, Calvert County Government announced, ending months of intense local debate over a project that had become one of the most contentious development fights in the county’s recent history.
AWS walked away from roughly 500 megawatts and 2.46 million square feet in Lusby—three campuses on 2,000 acres next to Calvert Cliffs. The nuclear-neighbor pitch ran into a contentious local process and folded before a shovel hit dirt. It never got past the conceptual site-plan stage. AWS filed in May, withdrew this week, and never made a PJM interconnection filing worth putting on an energized-capacity tracker. People hear “adjacent to a nuclear plant” and assume express-lane power. Turns out the county and its residents still get a say, and 500 megawatts needs more than a glossy site rendering. Calvert County’s first proposed large-scale data center is now its first large-scale withdrawal. Keep it out of the pipeline totals; announced square footage hasn’t become a buildout. Jonas Muthoni, writing in Microgrid Media:
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s August 3 reporting deadline for its Level 3 Essential Action Alert on computational loads has arrived across the North American bulk power system, requiring applicable registered grid entities to report how they are addressing reliability risks associated with data centers and other rapidly changing large loads.
NERC’s August 3 Level 3 deadline has landed. Grid entities are reporting now on how they’re handling fast-changing computational loads—not just adding another demand number to the forecast. Good. You can’t treat a giant data hall like a warehouse with a bigger utility bill when its power electronics can move load hard during a disturbance. Microgrid Media points to seven required actions. They cover modeling and studies, then instrumentation, commissioning, operations, protection, and control. A pretty comprehensive way to tell the industry its old assumptions have expired. And after the ERCOT queue disruption we just covered, the timing is almost comical. Developers can forecast all the gigawatts they want; operators now have to show how those loads behave when the grid gets ugly. From Debbie-Anne A. Reese at Federal Register:
On July 23, 2026, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Commission) convened a Chairman and Commissioner-led technical conference to discuss PJM Interconnection, L.L.C.'s (PJM) governance and stakeholder processes, with a particular focus on identifying and evaluating concrete, actionable reforms to improve PJM's ability to address operational and market needs in a timely and efficient manner.
FERC has put PJM’s large-load integration fight into Docket AD26-7-000, with comments due August 21. The July 23 conference had the chairman and commissioners in the room, not just the usual stakeholder cleanup. Good. PJM’s process has become a place where enormous new loads wait while everybody debates the rules for waiting. If you’ve got evidence that the queue or stakeholder structure is choking projects, get it in by August 21. Update on PJM’s large-load integration fight: FERC is taking comments on governance reforms through August 21. And FERC explicitly wants examples and evidence—ideally with less ceremonial throat-clearing. A future ADR forum is coming too. Fine—but developers, utilities, and consumer advocates should get their facts into this docket before the mediation table turns into another parking lot. This one's from GlobalCapital:
Equinix, the US-based data centre operator, issued a £280m data centre securitization last week, which took a new tack in wooing European investors to this still young asset class.
Equinix closed a £280 million deal on July 29 against two Slough data centers, rated A3/A and priced at 130 basis points over Gilts. After all the queue drama we just covered, capital markets are calmly assigning a spread to the collateral. And look at the structure: it’s non-recourse. If lease cash flows from those three investment-grade tenants wobble, Equinix Hyperscale 1 Holdings doesn’t have to step in and make noteholders whole. Right. It’s asset-backed debt. Different math from the unsecured corporate bonds we covered earlier this week. Goldman marketed a commercial-property securitization to European corporate-bond buyers, and the pitch worked. Fine, the coupon is tidy through the September 2031 anticipated repayment date. But the credit case lives or dies on two buildings in Slough and three tenants—not a press release saying AI needs more racks. If you follow the data center industry, you might also like AI IPO Watch, with daily coverage of OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, and SpaceX going public—every filing, valuation, and first trade, sourced, not rumored. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
We’re watching for post-conference comments on PJM governance and stakeholder reforms, due to FERC on August 21, 2026.
Links to every story are in the show notes, so take a look at the ones you’d like to explore further. That’s The Data Center Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.