Pennsylvania PUC's Tentative Curtailment Order Defines a Data Center at 25 MW and Takes Most of Them Off the Critical-Load List

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission voted 4-0 on Thursday, October 1, to put out for comment a tentative order that rebuilds the state’s emergency load control rule around data centers ^[1,3]. Under the order, in Docket M-2026-3064961, every electric distribution company would shed large computational customers ahead of everyone else when PJM calls on its Interim Resource Adequacy Service, and no data center would be treated as critical load by default ^[1]. The load gap behind it is PJM’s: a 6,831 MW reliability shortfall for the 2028/2029 delivery year ^[1].

When this column covered the September 10 motion that set this up, three things were open: the size threshold, which loads count, and what counts as capacity. The appendix answers the first two. The third, and all of the money, it leaves for later.

What the commission put out for comment

For the utilities, which the order calls EDCs, there are three proposals ^[1].

• A registry. Each EDC would keep a registry of large loads in its territory, “both existing and new,” give PJM the information it requests, and hand the registry to the commission once a year for its load-forecasting oversight under Act 45 of 2025 ^[1].
• A first-off procedure. Each EDC would revise its procedures to identify large computational customers and their available megawatts, divide PJM’s IRAS requests among them, notify them, and shed the requested amounts “prior to any other load shed from other customers” ^[1].
• No automatic critical status. Data centers could not be classified as critical load exempt from curtailment in pre-emergency or emergency events, and the commission asks how that prohibition should be defined ^[1].

The authority is the same as in September: 52 Pa. Code § 57.52, plus the commission’s powers under the Public Utility Code, including 66 Pa.C.S. § 1505(b) on load management programs ^[1]. The appendix is more than a tariff instruction. It strikes the old § 57.51, on retiring generating units, replaces it with a page of definitions, and drafts two new sections, §§ 57.53 and 57.54 ^[1]. “Depending on the development of this docket, a rulemaking may follow,” the order says ^[1].

Comments are due 30 days after the order appears in the Pennsylvania Bulletin, replies 45 days after ^[1]. The order gives no Bulletin date. A final order directing utilities to file updated procedures is set for the January 28, 2027 public meeting ^[1]. ABC27 reported that comments can also go by mail to the commission in Harrisburg ^[3].

Who counts as a Computational Load Site?

The appendix defines a Computational Load Site as a customer or applicant with “an anticipated maximum peak demand of 25 MW at a single point of interconnection or 50 MW at multiple points of interconnection that are interconnect to a single feeder,” mainly housing IT for software, AI training and deployment, cryptocurrency mining, or “other computational activities at a data center” ^[1]. Manufacturing, as 61 Pa. Code § 32.1 defined it on September 8, 2026, is excluded ^[1].

So a 40 MW factory is outside the class, which settles one of September’s questions. The threshold also sits below PJM’s. IRAS reaches end-use load with “a peak load of 50 MW or greater” that comes into service after PJM’s deadlines, as the Data Center Coalition describes the filing ^[4].

The draft is not uniform about which of those sites get cut first. Pre-emergency curtailment under § 57.53 applies “only to certain Computational Load Entity customers that are subject to the Incremental Resource Adequacy Service established by the regional transmission operator as verified by the EDC” ^[1]. (“Incremental” is a slip; everywhere else the order says Interim.) On this column’s reading, a 30 MW data center lands in the registry and in the emergency tiers, but in a pre-emergency it is cut only if PJM’s own rules put it under IRAS.

Three alert levels, and where a data center sits in each

The draft keys everything to NERC’s Energy Emergency Alert levels ^[1].

1. Pre-Emergency Load Control Event: declared by PJM around EEA Level 1, before Level 2. Utilities curtail eligible computational customers under IRAS through mandatory interruptible rate schedules ^[1].
2. Emergency Load Control Event: after EEA Level 2, before Level 3. Procedures “shall be applicable to all Computational Load Entity customers,” including when the alert comes with a Department of Energy 202(c) order on backup generation, and customers on interruptible schedules curtail under their schedules’ terms ^[1]. The text does not say what happens at this stage to a site that brought capacity for its full demand.
3. Emergency Forced Outage Event: declared by PJM, such as after EEA Level 3, when utilities must cut firm load. Non-Critical load goes before critical load ^[1].

Critical load has three levels. Level 1 covers hospitals, emergency responders, and critical utility, energy, military and government infrastructure; Level 3 covers residential customers and commercial or industrial sites whose prolonged outage would risk safety or an environmental release ^[1]. Both exclude computational load sites by name, with or without an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) ^[1].

Level 2 is the only way in, and it is narrow. A UPS Computational Load Site is protected only for “the portion of energy demand” needed for real-time service to a Level 1 facility, and only once its UPS or backup supply fails, runs out of fuel, or reaches its Department of Environmental Protection permit limits ^[1]. To qualify, the site attests to its UPS sizing and NFPA 110 classification, gets an attestation from the Level 1 customer under a commercial agreement, electrically separates the equipment serving that customer, and accepts annual inspection ^[1]. The split goes in an addendum filed with the commission, and a utility may require the site to pay for metering on the segregated load ^[1].

What it does to cost, and what it leaves out

IRAS would give Pennsylvania utilities four jobs, by the order’s list: carry out PJM’s directives, keep the registry, coordinate with the commission and customers, and run a compensation program consistent with PJM’s tariff ^[1]. The order takes up the first three. Compensation goes to “a future proceeding after the technical conference scheduled for November 17, 2026” ^[1]. That conference, under its own docket, M-2026-3065062, runs 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Harrisburg, with panelist applications due October 14, initial comments November 13, and post-conference comments December 18 ^[2].

The tentative order prices nothing. It is silent on who pays for registry work or interruptible schedules, and on the backstop procurement costs that Governor Josh Shapiro’s executive order asked the commission to keep off traditional retail customers ^[1]. It was drafted around PJM’s filed dates, a September 30 start for the Reliability Backstop Procurement and October 12 for IRAS ^[1]. FERC accepted the backstop design on September 29 but suspended it and sent cost allocation to a paper hearing, as this column reported on September 30.

The commission’s case for moving now is a study by its contractor, Synapse Energy Economics: with no further policy action and modest capacity growth, the state and PJM miss the one-loss-of-load-event-in-ten-years standard “in every year through 2030,” and do worse with more data center growth ^[1].

Where the sides stand

The order tracks the governor’s direction closely. It restates his ask that utilities curtail new computational large loads before any other customer unless the customer “has secured new incremental electric capacity for their entire demand” ^[1].

The Data Center Coalition has not filed in this docket, but it argued at FERC that the states “must take the lead” on retail curtailment and that PJM “should not seek to displace the role of the states by imposing a uniform retail curtailment policy across the PJM region” ^[4]. Pennsylvania is doing it the state way, as the coalition asked. The content differs from the coalition’s model, though. With the Virginia State Corporation Commission, the coalition proposed state tariffs that would curtail “designated large commercial and industrial customers,” or require their on-site backup generation, “once PJM has exhausted all other available reliability resources” and before broad manual load shed ^[4]. Pennsylvania’s draft starts earlier, at the pre-emergency stage, and names data centers and crypto miners rather than large industrial customers generally ^[1].

The coalition also describes its members as supporting “critical public services, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence, emergency response systems, and public safety operations” ^[4]. The Level 2 test asks each site to prove that link one Level 1 customer at a time, with a signed attestation ^[1].

The order was served on the Office of Consumer Advocate, the Office of Small Business Advocate, the commission’s enforcement bureau, the Energy Association of Pennsylvania and every EDC ^[1]. None had filed comments at publication.

What I’m watching

The Pennsylvania Bulletin date, which starts the 30-day comment clock. And November 17: whether the cost conference takes up payment for curtailed data centers, the one IRAS job this order left out.