The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will hold a technical conference on July 23 to rebuild how PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization serving 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C., makes decisions about its own grid. For any executive with a project sitting in PJM's interconnection queue or a large-load tariff already signed, that date now belongs on the capital planning calendar. A governance fix aimed at speeding up PJM's decisions could just as easily produce a longer stretch of procedural uncertainty before anything actually moves faster.
FERC Chairman Laura Swett set the conference in motion at PJM's annual meeting in Baltimore on May 12, telling the grid operator to its face that it may have "grown too big to function" and that its governance structure is "unacceptable." Swett described PJM's stakeholder process, which requires buy-in across five membership sectors before major changes take effect, as "slow where it must be fast, opaque where it must be transparent, and vulnerable to vetoes and agenda control exactly when the region needs immediate action." FERC Commissioner David LaCerte reinforced the point on July 9 at a WIRES meeting in Philadelphia, calling the status quo "really untenable" and saying PJM's process has "continued to just grind into gridlock."
Why FERC Escalated From Criticism to a Formal Conference
PJM's governance problem has been building for longer than the two months since Swett's Baltimore remarks. The grid operator missed its own reliability target in its most recent capacity auction, which cleared at a record price, and has separately drawn criticism for timing decisions on its reliability backstop auction that state officials and even the Trump administration asked it to reconsider. Those operational failures are what turned governance from a background complaint into FERC's stated priority. Swett described PJM as facing "a serious legitimacy crisis" in which confidence in its decision-making has "completely eroded," a characterization PJM's own spokesperson has since avoided disputing directly, saying only that the organization "appreciates" FERC's interest and looks forward to participating.
The five-sector structure Swett criticized was built to give transmission owners, generation owners, other suppliers, electric distributors, and end-use customers each a formal voice before PJM changes its rules. That balance was designed for a slower-moving grid. It was not designed for a region where data center load growth is outpacing PJM's own forecasts year over year, and where a stalled vote can leave a project's interconnection status unresolved for another full stakeholder cycle.
What the July 23 Conference Will and Will Not Decide
FERC has been explicit that the conference will not rule on any pending docket. Instead, it will convene PJM's board, executive management, representatives from all five membership sectors, investors, PJM's independent market monitor, state regulators, the Organization of PJM States Inc., and consumer advocates to build a public record aimed at "actionable change," in Swett's words, rather than another round of grievances. That framing matters for anyone trying to plan around the outcome. The conference itself will not produce new rules. It will produce a record that FERC uses to decide, on its own timeline, whether and how to order PJM to restructure its stakeholder process.
That sequencing means the near-term effect on capital planning is uncertainty, not resolution. A project already navigating PJM's interconnection backlog, which Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has tracked at more than 2,000 gigawatts of proposed capacity awaiting connection nationally, now has to factor in the possibility that the rules governing that queue could change mid-process. Executives should not assume a governance fix arrives on any particular timeline, and should not assume it resolves in favor of faster approvals rather than a longer transition period while new structures are negotiated.
The Overlap With Existing Cost and Timeline Pressure
PJM's governance troubles are landing on top of cost pressure that was already reshaping how companies evaluate the region. Manufacturers and data center developers in the PJM footprint are already competing directly for the same substation capacity, a dynamic that has pushed some industrial operators toward on-site generation just to control their own timelines. Large-load customers signing new tariffs in the region are also taking on multi-year minimum terms and per-megawatt collateral requirements that function more like project finance agreements than utility bills, a structure finance teams increasingly need to underwrite the way they would a long-term lease. A governance overhaul does not resolve either pressure on its own, but it does determine how quickly PJM can act on the reforms already under discussion to relieve them.
The Panelist List Will Say More Than the Conference Itself
Watch the self-nomination process under FERC Docket No. AD26-7-000 before July 23 arrives. Who gets a seat, and which of PJM's five sectors shows up willing to cede ground, will say more about the odds of real reform than anything likely to be announced on the day itself. Swett called this "a work session to build a record eyed toward actionable change," not a decision point, and FERC has already said it will not touch any pending docket during the proceeding. That leaves the actual rulemaking, if one comes, on a timeline nobody at FERC has committed to yet.
Executives with capital tied to PJM's queue should read that as a caution against betting on speed. Swett has been unusually direct for a sitting FERC chair, and LaCerte's comments three days ago suggest the commission isn't backing off. But directness about the problem is not the same as clarity about the fix, and a governance overhaul that takes a year to negotiate could add as much uncertainty as the dysfunction it's meant to replace.
