On May 7, the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel (OPC), the state agency that represents utility customers, filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Its target: the roughly $2 billion share of PJM Interconnection’s $22 billion in competitive regional transmission projects — approved over the past three years largely to serve data center demand — that PJM’s rules assign to Maryland ratepayers. Tom’s Hardware, covering the filing on May 9, put the household view in focus: about $1.6 billion in added costs for Marylanders over the next decade.
The dispute is not about whether the grid needs upgrading. It is about who pays. Data center load growth is concentrated in Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois; Maryland’s forecast growth is far lower, yet its residents are being billed for infrastructure serving demand elsewhere. This is the first time the question of who absorbs AI infrastructure costs has landed squarely on a federal regulator’s desk. And because PJM’s allocation approach is copied in spirit across other regional grids, the answer will ripple well beyond the Mid-Atlantic.
How $2 Billion Landed on Maryland
PJM is the largest transmission operator in the United States, serving all or part of 13 states plus Washington, D.C. — about 65 million people, or roughly a fifth of the country. The OPC’s ten-year breakdown: $823 million for residential customers (about $345 per customer, or just under $3 a month), $146 million for commercial customers (about $673 each), and $629 million for industrial customers (about $15,074 each). Most of the affected Marylanders are BGE and Pepco customers. The monthly figure looks small, but it sharpens the core question: why should Maryland residents subsidize Virginia’s data center corridor?
What’s Broken in PJM’s “Hybrid” Allocation Rules
The OPC is challenging PJM’s “hybrid” method for allocating costs of projects above 500kV: half is spread across zones in proportion to their demand, and half according to power-flow analysis. That formula made sense when load grew evenly across the region. Data centers broke the premise — load is now heavily concentrated in a few zones, so proportional spreading quietly turns low-growth states into subsidy donors. Maryland People’s Counsel David S. Lapp did not mince words: “PJM’s cost allocation rules are broken,” and “without FERC action, Maryland customers face paying billions for transmission infrastructure” that benefits data centers. The remedy the OPC seeks is direct: assign costs to the zones where the data centers actually locate — Dominion’s Virginia zone, for instance — or charge the large data center customers themselves.
Why the Ratepayer Protection Pledge Doesn’t Stop This
The complaint pointedly cites the White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge of March 4, 2026, under which hyperscale data center developers promised to cover the grid costs they cause. The pledge, however, is voluntary: if operators don’t follow it, the costs still fall on existing customers. The OPC also flags the “extreme uncertainty” in data-center load forecasts — once transmission projects are approved, utilities profit from the investment even if the projected demand never materializes. State-level large-load tariffs and transmission security agreements can address in-state projects, but they cannot fix regional cost allocation. That is precisely why this fight has been taken to FERC: a pledge without enforcement teeth leaves regulators to do the enforcing.
What It Means for Compute and Siting Plans
For teams planning AI capacity, three signals. First, transmission cost is now part of AI unit economics: the same GPU-hour carries different embedded grid obligations depending on which PJM zone it sits in, and those costs may soon be priced directly. Second, demand-side pressure keeps hardening — AMD’s Q1 report showed data center revenue up 57% year over year, while the grid-side backlash builds: Tom’s Hardware counts 69 jurisdictions with data center moratoriums, and Virginia has seen a 76% price-surge controversy. “Bring your own power” is shifting from differentiator to siting prerequisite. Third, how FERC rules on this complaint will decide whether grid costs stick to load or stick to people — a more fundamental variable in compute pricing than any single chip-supply headline.
Sources
- Maryland citizens slapped with $2 billion grid upgrade bill for out-of-state AI data centers — Tom’s Hardware
- OPC complaint challenges PJM cost rules — Maryland Office of People’s Counsel
- Maryland $2B grid bill discussion — Hacker News
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.