On June 18, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission did something it had promised to do since April: act on how data centers connect to the American power grid. The docket, RM26-4-000, had been open since October 2025. More than 3,500 pages of comments had come in. The energy secretary had directed the commission to move. Everyone expected a rule.

FERC did not write a rule.

Instead, it issued six separate orders, one to each regional grid operator in the country, directing each to justify or reform how it handles large electrical loads within thirty to sixty days. PJM, which runs the mid-Atlantic grid. MISO, the Midwest. The Southwest Power Pool, which manages Oklahoma and much of the central United States. ISO New England. The New York ISO. The California ISO. Six orders, six operators, six different starting points.

The decision not to write a national standard was itself the decision. A uniform federal rule for large-load interconnection would have drawn immediate legal challenge from state regulators who have spent decades governing their own grids. The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners filed comments in April warning FERC not to encroach on state jurisdiction. The Virginia State Corporation Commission said the same thing. A rule broad enough to standardize data-center interconnection nationally would have been broad enough to invite years of litigation over whether FERC had the authority to write it.

So FERC went the other way. Region by region, operator by operator, each starting from its own existing tariff. The commission pointed to the Southwest Power Pool’s High Impact Large Load process as a model the others should study. SPP had already built a dedicated study pathway for very large customers, and FERC found it just and reasonable. The message to the other five operators: show us something at least this good, or we will tell you what to fix.

This is not how regulators act when they want headlines. It is how they act when they want the result to survive a courtroom. Section 206 of the Federal Power Act lets FERC order specific utilities or grid operators to fix tariffs the commission finds unjust or unreasonable. It is a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. Each order targets a specific operator’s specific rules. Each can be defended on its own record. A legal challenge to the SPP order does not automatically block the PJM order. The approach is slower, less dramatic, and far more durable than a single national rulemaking would have been.

The irony is that by declining to write one national rule, FERC may end up with six regional rules that converge on the same principles anyway: large loads pay their own interconnection costs, curtailable loads get expedited study, and the grid operator must have a transparent, nondiscriminatory process for connecting facilities that draw more than twenty megawatts. The destination is the same. The path just runs through existing institutions rather than over them.

Oklahoma’s position in this is worth noting. SPP, the grid operator FERC held up as a model, is the one that manages our state’s transmission. The principles embedded in HB 2992 (cost causation, ratepayer protection, separate treatment for very large customers) already align with what FERC is now asking every other region to build. Oklahoma wrote the state version of this framework before the federal government got around to asking for one. That is not an accident. It is what happens when a state legislature takes the grid seriously before Washington does.

The compliance clock is running. Each regional operator has thirty to sixty days to respond. By August, we will know whether SPP’s model becomes the national template or whether the regions fragment. Either outcome reshapes the landscape for every data center, every utility, and every ratepayer in the country.

The Inference covers this in depth in Issue 18, out today, alongside the municipal moratorium wave that represents the other half of the governance question FERC cannot reach: not what a data center pays for the grid, but whether the town that hosts it ever agreed.

David & Æ