People’s Counsel addresses PJM Board, urging action to take on data center issues
BALTIMORE – Maryland People’s Counsel David Lapp told the Board of Managers of PJM Interconnection, LLC yesterday that it should “presumptively exclude” actual and projected data center load growth from its markets and transmission planning to protect ordinary households from data center-driven costs.
Speaking on behalf of the Consumer Advocates of PJM States (CAPS), he urged PJM to target its efforts on ensuring that data centers themselves pay all their costs, rather than sending high price signals to promote new generation that would add costs to existing customers who are already at a breaking point.
“PJM’s forecasts show that it is the city-size energy demands of data centers that are driving up wholesale energy, capacity, and transmission costs,” Lapp said. “While PJM often refers to electrification and state policy as additional drivers of increased demand, those impacts are negligible.” Using an illustration (shown below) based on PJM’s own 2026 load projections, he pointed out that non-data center growth is “negative to flat over the next ten years.”
PJM, which manages power markets and transmission service for all or parts of 13 states, including Maryland, held its annual meeting in Baltimore this week, where much of the discussion centered on challenges the region faces because of the unprecedented scale of projected large load growth from data centers.
In his remarks, Lapp said that PJM is facing credibility issues because of its “simplistic message that there’s a supply-demand shortage to resolve—full stop.” PJM should be pinpointing the problem of the unprecedented scale of data center-driven load growth and then “targeting its remedies to that problem,” he said.
Lapp pointed to the Ratepayer Protection Pledge and the White House and PJM governors’ statement of principles, which both recognize the data center issue but require implementation. Sixty-seven million people depend on PJM to implement the pledge, Lapp said, pointing out that data centers are already driving higher prices in PJM’s power markets and for transmission service. PJM should only include data centers in its markets and planning if it can “map every cost directly to its data center causer and prevent costs from leaking into the bills of ordinary households,” he said.
Lapp’s comments follow OPC’s complaint filed last week at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), challenging PJM’s rules for assigning data center-driven transmission costs to Marylanders. For several years, OPC has advocated at PJM and FERC for reforms to protect residential customers from the costs associated with power hungry data centers. For more on OPC’s advocacy on data centers, visit OPC’s website.
The full text of Lapp’s remarks and presentation are available here.
 The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel is an independent state agency that represents Maryland’s residential consumers of electric, natural gas, telecommunications, private water and certain transportation matters before the Public Service Commission, federal regulatory agencies and the courts.
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