FERC Large Load Orders

Background

The question that set this off: when FERC moved to fix how data centers and other large loads connect to the grid, what did it actually order — and can you read the orders themselves instead of the trade-press summary of them?

On October 23, 2025, the Department of Energy invoked its rarely used Section 403 authority to direct FERC to open a rulemaking on connecting large loads — data centers, AI, advanced manufacturing — to the interstate grid (Docket RM26-4-000). Rather than run a multi-year notice-and-comment rulemaking, FERC answered on June 18, 2026 with six tailored Section 206 show cause orders, one to each RTO/ISO: each makes a threshold finding that the region's tariff may be unjust and unreasonable for lack of clear, consistent large-load rules, then puts the market on a 30/60-day clock to defend the status quo or file a fix. The through-line is cost causation made visible — the large load that triggers a network upgrade should bear its cost and spare ordinary ratepayers. This microsite puts the whole arc, and every word of the orders, in one place for an energy-regulatory audience.

How It Works

It's a static, dependency-free microsite — no backend, no build step — organized as six tabs that move from the summary down to the primary sources:

• Overview & Timeline: the six headline figures (six RTOs/ISOs, five reform categories, the 30/60-day clock, the >20 MW "large load" threshold), the governing authority and docket numbers, the deciding commissioners, and the chronology from the October 2025 DOE directive to the June 2026 orders — including why FERC chose tailored §206 show cause orders over a generic NOPR.
• Reforms: the five reform categories that every order shares, the transmission-versus-retail jurisdictional line, and the per-RTO regional distinctions, grounded in the orders' own framing.
• Dockets (E-7 to E-12, plus E-2): six per-RTO accordions for what's unique to each system — the quoted directives, each page-linked to the committed order PDF and ferc.gov, the region-specific Section IV asks, what each commissioner said about that order, and the full named-respondent roster. A seventh card holds Item E-2, the PJM co-location order decided the same morning that the six orders extend to every other region.
• Comments (RM26-4): all 273 comments in the DOE docket, in filing order, each tagged across three lenses — which of the ANOPR's eight questions, which of the five reform principles, and which of the six RTO regions it engages — and filterable by org, type, question, principle, position, or region.
• Sourced, not summarized: every displayed directive, finding, and commissioner quote must appear verbatim in the committed source text, enforced by a whole-site quote audit — 56 tests plus a one-command sweep that fails loud if any quote drifts from the corpus it cites. Nothing sits on the page that isn't page-cited.

[View the Live Site] | [View the Code]