Maryland ratepayers want out of paying for Virginia’s data centers—so they’ve taken their fight to FERC. (RTO Insider)
PJM's method of splitting transmission costs across the region is now “unjust and unreasonable,” according to a recent complaint from the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel. OPC says Marylanders will pay roughly $1.6B over the next decade for transmission projects, which mainly serve out-of-state data centers.
The argument: OPC says PJM’s cost-sharing rules were built for an era of slow, broadly distributed load growth—not for an influx of data centers that can gobble up as much power as a midsize city.