Who writes the rules ofThe Grid

The proceeding did not start at FERC. Energy Secretary Chris Wright sent a section 403 letter (Department of Energy Organization Act) attaching DOE’s own draft rulemaking notice with 14 principles for connecting large loads. FERC never issued its own advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANOPR)—the agenda arrived from the executive branch, pre-drafted.

On one day—November 21, 2025—Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, and Oracle each filed initial comments in their own names. These are the companies whose data centers the rule will govern, on the record asking for specific language before the operators write it.

The industry also speaks through a trade group. The Data Center Coalition (DCC) filed its own comment the same day—a second channel carrying industry language into the same docket, alongside the companies’ direct filings.

On June 18, 2026, FERC issued six unanimous show-cause orders under section 206 of the Federal Power Act—one per grid operator—each preliminarily finding the operator’s tariff unjust and unreasonable for large-load integration. The orders hand the pen to PJM, SPP, NYISO, MISO, CAISO, and ISO-NE: they now draft the tariff text.

The fight that pushed co-location onto FERC’s docket. Talen sold its Cumulus data-center campus at the Susquehanna nuclear plant to AWS for $650 million, alongside a power contract for up to 960 megawatts (MW); FERC then rejected the amended interconnection agreement that would have raised the co-located load from 300 to 480 MW. The expanded deal that followed ran to 1,920 MW of nuclear power through 2042 at full contract quantity.

A 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) is restarting Three Mile Island Unit 1 as the Crane Clean Energy Center—837 MW at its 2019 retirement—with Microsoft as the buyer. A single customer’s demand is reopening a retired nuclear plant.