The mechanism. On June 18, 2026, FERC issued show-cause orders against every jurisdictional regional transmission organization, forcing PJM, MISO, ERCOT, and the rest to justify — or rewrite within 60 days — their rules for interconnecting "large loads" (20+ MW, the data center threshold) to the grid. The order followed an October 2025 directive from Energy Secretary Chris Wright demanding FERC accelerate these hookups, and it assigns 100% of network upgrade costs to the load itself, standardizes study deposits, and forces utilities to study load and generation concurrently instead of sequentially. The obvious read: this is bullish for utilities, because faster interconnection means faster data-center revenue. The trade everyone's already made is picking which utility — NextEra, Southern, Dominion — lands the next hyperscale campus.
But interconnection reform doesn't create turbines, transformers, or linemen. It just clears the paperwork queue in front of a physical bottleneck that was already the real constraint. Whichever utility wins the customer still has to buy the same scarce steel from the same handful of vendors.