A consent item, decided in minutes
On 16 July 2026, FERC approved item E-1 on its consent agenda, docket RD26-7-000, by a unanimous 5-0 vote. Consent items are the routine end of an open meeting, the business a commission clears without debate. This one directed NERC to develop new or modified mandatory Reliability Standards addressing the reliability risks of integrating computational loads - data centres - into the Bulk-Power System.
Chair Swett's rationale was blunt about the physics. Large loads "have the potential to change their demand almost instantly", and that instant swing creates voltage stability problems for the grid around them. Commissioner Rosner called the deadlines "very rapid" by regulatory standards, and said they were achievable anyway.
The registry is where the obligation lives
The registry, not the standards, is what changes an owner's legal position. FERC also directed NERC to revise its Rules of Procedure, including the registry criteria for computational load entities. Registration is the switch. Once an entity sits on the registry, the standards that apply to it are mandatory and FERC-enforceable, and the entity is answerable in audit.
NERC registration has historically flowed almost exclusively from owning generation or transmission. A data centre bought power like any other customer, and the utility carried the reliability duty on its behalf. Scale changed the size of the bill. It did not change who answered to the regulator.
This order inverts that arrangement. An owner who merely consumes power, at sufficient scale, is being brought into the registry and will acquire mandatory obligations and audit exposure that attach to the entity rather than to the meter. The compliance burden moves from the utility to the load, and the liability moves with it.
31 December 2026 is the date that binds
Both directives fall due on the same day. NERC must deliver the Reliability Standards and the revised Rules of Procedure by 31 December 2026, with a Phase II work plan following on 1 March 2027. FERC acted under section 215(d)(5) of the Federal Power Act, the provision that lets it order NERC to write a standard rather than wait for one to be proposed.
For an owner planning compute capacity in the United States, the timing is the operative fact. The criteria that decide whether a site is registered will be drafted, argued and filed inside the next five and a half months, and the drafting is where the perimeter gets set.
What the order does not say
Yes, but: the order sets no megawatt threshold. FERC deliberately left sizing to NERC's standards process, which means the question every owner wants answered, whether their site is captured, has no answer in the document itself.
Figures are circulating regardless. They come from NERC's draft registration criteria of 1 April 2026, they are not final, and they are not in this order. An owner who plans against them is planning against a draft. The honest position today is that the perimeter is undrawn, and the people drawing it are working to a December deadline.
The reach into Europe, stated honestly
The scope limit matters more than the headline. This is United States law, administered by a United States regulator over the Bulk-Power System. It reaches a European owner in one circumstance: where that owner owns, operates or co-locates compute inside the United States. There is no European equivalent in flight, and we have seen no evidence of one.
What we would watch, and this is Servola's own reading rather than anything FERC said, is the precedent inside the idea: that a consumer of power at scale can be pulled into a reliability registry at all. European operators with US footprints should read the NERC drafts as they land, because their US entities are the ones that will be registered, audited and answerable.
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