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Quote: Amazon Web Services has formally withdrawn its application to build a massive data center campus near the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant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