FERC Blocked ComEd From Canceling a 1.8-Gigawatt Data Center's Contract

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Sept. 22 rejected Commonwealth Edison's notice to cancel the transmission security agreement behind PowerHouse Hillwood's data center campus in Joliet, Illinois, leaving a contract for 1.8 gigawatts of grid capacity in force. The order, in docket ER26-1032, keeps the power commitment for a $20 billion project on the books while a federal court decides whether the developer actually met its credit terms.

FERC accepted the agreement in March. Under it, PowerHouse Hillwood committed to pay for transmission service covering at least 75 percent of the campus's anticipated size over the contract term, or pay a termination fee instead. The dispute is over what the developer had to post up front. PowerHouse Hillwood provided a letter of credit for $1 and argued that satisfied the agreement. ComEd disagreed and moved to cancel it. Commissioner David LaCerte called the $1 posting an "embarrassing legal fiction," but the Commission declined to interpret the contract language itself and left the question to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

The campus at issue covers roughly 795 acres near South Rowell and Bernhard roads. Plans call for 24 principal data center buildings, each about 144,500 square feet on two stories, built in four phases of six buildings apiece, for close to 6.94 million gross square feet at full buildout. That is a decade of electrical scope in one entitlement: substation and switchyard work, medium-voltage feeders, switchgear and busway, generator and UPS lineups, and building-by-building commissioning.

Nothing moved on the site because of the order. What moved was the document that governs when utility capacity shows up, and on phased campuses that document drives the manpower curve more than the building permit does. Contractors staff hyperscale work against energization milestones, so a canceled interconnection contract does not slow a job down by a few weeks; it removes the reason to mobilize at all until a replacement is signed. FERC's order restores that footing without settling it, because the agreement stands while its credit provisions stay open in court.

That is why the rest of the order matters to hiring. Commissioners used the decision to press for standardized cost-recovery and credit language on large-load interconnections, and FERC is already moving that direction. In June the Commission issued show-cause orders to the jurisdictional grid operators on large-load interconnection, defining a large load as a single-site customer above 50 megawatts connecting at voltages above 69 kilovolts, and it has a rulemaking open on the same subject in docket RM26-4. Uniform terms would make the date a campus can take power, and therefore the date its electrical crews ramp, easier to forecast than it is now.

For commercial electricians chasing data center work, the first gate on a job this size is not the permit. It is the interconnection file.