A new federal order could strengthen Maryland’s claim that its households and businesses have been unlawfully billed billions of dollars for transmission upgrades to serve out-of-state data centers. But it is unclear whether the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s recent directive, which requires six regional grid operators, including PJM Interconnection, to justify how they assign those costs or propose changes, will help Maryland recover money PJM already allocated to the state or will apply only to future cost allocations.
FERC’s order almost coincided with a June 16 letter signed by 80 Maryland lawmakers who pressed commissioners to grant immediate relief from $2 billion in costs that PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator serving Maryland, portions of 12 other states and Washington, D.C., has billed the state as cost-sharing for building new power lines for data centers in neighboring Virginia.
Legislators wrote that if the costs are not refunded, as a complaint from the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel (OPC) calls for, “Maryland electric customers will pay $1.6 billion for
just these projects over the next ten years, and much more over longer periods.” The customers who’d pay the larger bills did not cause the upgrades and will not meaningfully benefit from them, the lawmakers said.
