(John Cole, The Center Square) As the debate around data centers continues in Pennsylvania, a pair of lawmakers have penned a letter pushing for answers and transparency at the federal level.
Last week, U.S. Reps. Madeleine Dean, D-4th District, and Dwight Evans, D-3rd District, sent a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, asking how the agency is overseeing increased power demand from data centers.
FERC’s mission, according to the agency’s website, is to assist consumers in “obtaining reliable, safe, secure, and economically efficient energy services at a reasonable cost through appropriate regulatory and market means, and collaborative efforts.”
Dean and Evans pinpointed the reliability of the electrical grid and the costs that may be passed on to home consumers in their request.
“There is an increasing presence of data centers, and questions of how, when, and where they will connect to the grid,” Dean and Evans write. “Our concerns about the future of data centers and their energy demand impacting interstate transmission capacity not only include realistic assessments of load interconnection projects that will be added to the grid but also fluctuating load cycles destabilizing the grid.”
“This is in addition to concerns about the environmental impact, including air quality and water consumption, community input, long-term planning, and the inclusion of distributed energy resources (DERs) in any future buildout,” they continued.
In this letter, Dean and Evans also cite a recent alert from The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC, an organization that analyzes the reliability of power grids throughout the United States and Canada.
This NERC alert highlighted concerns about reliability arising from new computational loads, including data centers, interacting with the bulk power system, while highlighting “7 advisory actions that transmission planners, owners, coordinators, and operators should consider, and encourages their adoption to support reliability standards and address emerging challenges.”
As Dean and Evans seek answers at the federal level, the discussion has also emerged among lawmakers in the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
On May 4, the state House unanimously passed House Bill 2223, authored by Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler, which would require electric utilities to evaluate and consider the use of advanced transmission technologies, or ATTs, on new and existing service lines within their transmission siting applications filed with the state regulatory commission, which are currently required by law for all newly proposed transmission facilities.
A week prior to that vote, Gov. Josh Shapiro sent a letter to utility companies laying out his administration’s criteria they will consider justifiable in future rate-making cases.
And last week, Shapiro announced voluntary standards that data center developers will have to meet to receive state government support. Republican leadership in the Senate signaled broad agreement with the governor’s pitch.
Rank and file members on both sides of the aisle, however, have suggested to repeal a 2021 sales tax exemption for data center developers, while others want to pause consideration of new proposals for as long as three years.
The letter from Dean and Evans to FERC also requested information on the Trump administration’s decision to cancel clean-energy projects, believing this could “impact transmission planning and delivering electricity to consumers due to changes in energy supply.”
A statewide tracker for data center proposals noted that 68 sites have either been proposed or are under construction. An additional 72 data centers are active, according to the map.
Evans and Dean requested responses by June 30.
