Big loads need grid access. The bill's becoming the problem. This is The Data Center Daily. Today, utilities start writing cost controls, and a New England project shows what happens when the interconnection bill hits. Plus, a federal order with a short clock and a former coal site with a big question mark. First up, the tariff language. This one's from The Bay Net:
Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative(SMECO) has proposed updated rate rules for data centers and other extremely large electricity users as Maryland works to prevent residential customers from paying for infrastructure built to serve energy-intensive developments. SMECO submitted revised pages for its “very large load” rate schedule to the Maryland Public Service Commission on Sept. 1, according to the commission’s official filings report.
SMECO put it in a tariff filing: customers at 100 megawatts or more face minimum bills, exit fees, and protections on upgrade costs. Good—get the guardrails into the rate schedule before somebody builds a substation for a tenant who changes its mind. Filed September 1 at the Maryland PSC, not approved September 1. That distinction matters. The statutory threshold is concrete: projected demand of at least 100 megawatts and a load factor above 80%. Now let's see the teeth. If a hyperscaler signs a 15-year lease, triggers upgrades, then walks, does that exit fee cover the stranded wires—or do households get a polite little surcharge? SMECO wasn't freelancing, either. Potomac Edison, Pepco, Delmarva Power, and BGE filed similar updates the same day. Maryland is moving the large-load fight out of press releases and into rate design. This one's from Latitude Media:
The order declares the presence of foreign-made equipment in the bulk power system a national emergency, a legal move enabling Trump to block foreign transactions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. It names two risks: first, that this equipment could have “digital backdoors” that expose the system to foreign threats, and also that reliance on these imports has created supply chain and national security vulnerabilities.
Trump's order puts transformers, inverters, batteries, firmware—the stuff projects actually need—under a national-emergency umbrella. Great. We've already got interconnection fights; now builders have four months of DOE rulemaking looming over the equipment list. Latitude's Ben Boucher of Wood Mackenzie puts 99.9% of the affected import value back to China. The open question is whether a Chinese OEM operating through a non-targeted country still gets caught, as foreign-entity rules have tried to do. And DOE can potentially require removal of equipment already installed. If that reaches beyond new purchases, somebody needs to price the replacement transformers and downtime before anyone calls this a security memo. SMECO's Maryland filing uses minimum bills and exit fees to keep large-load costs off other customers. Now Washington may change the equipment costs under those same builds. The tariff is getting clearer; the supply chain is getting murkier. WBUR writes:
The company behind a large and controversial proposed battery project in Tewksbury pulled the plug on the development this week after learning it would have to pay $65 million to connect to the electric grid. That's more than three times what the company, East Point Energy, had expected to pay to bring its project online.
Sixty-five million dollars to interconnect a 125-megawatt battery in Tewksbury—more than triple East Point Energy's estimate. That project cleared the hard local fights, and then the grid invoice killed it. ISO New England's recent study puts average costs at $178 million. The $65 million number is painful, but the average points to a planning problem, not a freak billing error. Residents may be celebrating the cancellation, but a battery beside an existing National Grid substation still couldn't make the numbers work. So which storage projects in New England's reliability plans have actually underwritten a nine-figure interconnection hit? SMECO is trying to keep large-load costs off other customers. In Tewksbury, late-arriving connection costs blew up the project before it could help the grid. From WMUR:
The filings also don't mention a data center explicitly, referring only to a "facility." But according to the filings, Granite Shore Power wants to assess the viability of a 350-megawatt facility interconnection to the power grid. That's enough energy to power what's known as a hyperscale data center, the type that can support artificial intelligence or other large-scale workloads.
A 350-megawatt viability assessment is a real number in a FERC filing, even if the customer is still called only a “facility.” At Merrimack Station, that's hyperscale-sized demand being tested against a coal plant scheduled to close in 2028. Bow gets the legacy-site special. There's a retiring coal plant with existing power infrastructure, and somebody's sniffing around for 350 megawatts before they put a name on the door. Convenient. Eversource says it has to evaluate developer proposals, and that's true. But the governor pushing a data-center moratorium into the budget while this assessment sits in the queue creates a pretty direct policy collision. New Hampshire should be asking the same thing now: if this 350-megawatt prospect walks after upgrades start, who's holding the bill? It better not be Bow. If you’re enjoying The Data Center Daily, please subscribe or leave us a review wherever you’re listening. Reviews help other people find the show, and they help us keep making these briefings for you.
Links to every story are in the show notes. Take a look at the ones that caught your attention and read further when you have a moment. That’s The Data Center Daily for today. Until the next episode, this is a Lantern Podcast.