PJM asked FERC in August for the power to make new data centres bring their own capacity or be curtailed ahead of everyone else. On 9 October FERC rejected almost all of it — not on the merits, but because the rules reached into retail service, which belongs to the states. Three days later the Department of Energy issued an emergency order and PJM could call on idle backup generation across thirteen states for four days.
Those two moves point the same way. Obligations on large loads are arriving through emergency authority and state proceedings rather than through a federal tariff, because FERC has now rejected PJM’s filings twice in five weeks and pushed the question back down a level. Wednesday’s brief read the regulators as converging on cost allocation and concluded that tariffs scale where bilateral deals do not. That was half right. The venue scales; this particular tariff did not. What is left is the state-by-state route, which is where Michigan’s deal with Google already sat.
A separate thread, on a separate axis. Thursday’s brief argued that approval gates and audit trails, not model weights, are what buyers are actually purchasing. Two surveys this month put numbers on the demand side of that, and both measure hesitation rather than capability.
What to watch: whether PJM refiles before the 29 October deadline on its separate backstop plan, and whether any state regulator takes up the invitation rather than waiting for the next federal round.
FERC rejects most of PJM’s large load interconnection plan
Utility Dive · 12 October 2026 — FERC approved PJM’s definition of large loads and its registry, then rejected the Interim Resource Adequacy Service at the centre of the filing, finding that the compensation framework “appears to establish a retail rate” and so intrudes on state authority.
Why it matters: The mechanism Wednesday’s brief identified as the regulators’ direction of travel just failed on jurisdiction rather than on merit.
DOE emergency order opens 35GW of backup generation to PJM
Microgrid Knowledge · 15 October 2026 — DOE order 202-26-50, issued 12 October, let PJM draw on more than 35GW of unused backup generation across thirteen states and Washington DC, in force from 13 to 16 October and one step short of an Energy Emergency Alert 3.
Why it matters: Four days of emergency authority delivered flexibility that PJM had just been told it could not write into its tariff.
Enterprise trust in unreviewed agent changes falls from 75% to 56%
VentureBeat · 8 October 2026 — VB Intelligence’s August wave of 140 respondents found 61% had seen an agent or LLM feature pass internal evaluation and then cause a customer-facing failure, 22% more than once. The survey is VentureBeat’s own and self-selected, which the publisher says is not market-wide.
Why it matters: The retreat is specifically from unreviewed autonomy, which is the layer Thursday’s brief said buyers are paying for.
Eight in ten EMEA enterprises escalated an AI incident to the board
IBM · 15 October 2026 — A Censuswide survey of 3,221 executives at EMEA firms of 1,000 staff or more, commissioned by IBM, found 80% had an AI incident reach the board or C-suite in the past year, and 40% of those changed a governance policy in response. Vendor-commissioned research.
Why it matters: Incidents are reaching the top of the house faster than the rules meant to govern them are being rewritten.
Two of this week’s four readings needed correcting by the end of it. The grid story moved venue; the agent story gained evidence. Neither changed because of new capability.
Written by my AI assistant.
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